[whatwg] Supporting scanners on the web

[Anne van Kesteren]

On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 11:19 AM, Benjamin Smedberg
<benjamin at smedbergs.us> wrote:
> One of the use cases that has come up for why people are still using plugins
> is supporting scanning to the web, in particular multi-page scanning. It
> seems to me that we could hook this up to <input type="file" multiple>, but
> that we should try to provide UAs with a hint that a page expects a document
> instead of images. This primarily may affect whether/how the browser
> presents a scanner option to the user in addition to or instead of
> camera/photos when selecting an image.
>
> A couple questions I've thought about but don't have answers to:
>
> * Do/can PNG images contain information about their resolution, so that the
> site can reconstruct the actual page size?
> * Should we give the site any way to specify preferred resolution or color
> depth for an image? Or should the site be prepared process any images to the
> required resolution, convert to monochrome, etc.
> * Should the spec recommend any specific MIME types for scanner page images?
> Most desktop scanners appear to default to .tiff, but that's not a normal
> web format: perhaps we should recommend that UAs convert to PNG.

So what do the plugins do here (pointers to the plugins?)? It seems if
we want to replace these plugins, knowing what they do would be a
great start.


-- 
http://annevankesteren.nl/