Re: [w3c/gamepad] id field in gamepad might have a persistent identifier? (#73)

There are two issues at play here:
1. Being able to distinguish between different devices. Consoles (which only support the manufacturer's standard controllers) have mostly settled on having LEDs to indicate player 1-4 on the controller itself. Having some way to indicate the device is critical if the user connects more than one controller.
2. Being able to take arbitrary devices and map their inputs to known quantities, like "button 1 on this device is the A button and it is the primary action button". Providing the vendor and product IDs allows content pages to use JS libraries to provide this functionality. [I wrote a prototype of such a library](https://github.com/luser/gamepadmapping.js) along with [a small data set of controllers I had](https://github.com/luser/gamepad-data/). Not having this ability means that either browsers have to maintain these mappings, or each webapp has to ask the user to map their controls, neither of which are great.

I don't think pushing this functionality up into the browser is a good idea either--browsers are hard to change, content pages can easily iterate on this sort of functionality.

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Received on Thursday, 7 June 2018 20:07:00 UTC