[whatwg] Revisiting MIDI - <device> and <audio>

[Charles Pritchard]

Hello All,

Thought I'd review the topic of supporting MIDI devices in HTML 5.

My initial post about MIDI treated the format as a text stream:
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2010-May/026524.html


Let's start looking at the <device> tag.
a MIDI device, is, quite surely, a <device>.

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/commands.html#devices

I'd warn, that while MIDI is typically thought of as a media device,
it's actually just a plain old Event Source.

It seems that Stream is appropriate (enough), to enable MIDI support in 
the browser.
It's a light event source.

It also seems that the peer-2-peer section allows for multiple device 
streams;
whereas the simple device section allows only one media device (a webcam).

MIDI does require the ability to handle multiple event sources, for 
live-use.



-Charles