These are all Javascript APIs. I think what's particularly notable about the OP is that it's HTML.

Yes but the person I'm replying to is talking about JS APIs

I'm here for the JS comments.

I'm amazed at how quickly I can throw together a front end feature in JavaScript on my otherwise html site.

Really all of web impressed me over the desktop/app counterparts. I wrote and read to/from a php database with less than 2 hours of time. Laravel has me doing user authentication + useful coding in less than 40 hours after the tutorial.

Old enough to remember when the accelerometer didn't require permission to access.

Me too but I'm glad it does now and I don't have fear (web) apps that exploit the accelerometer as microphone.

It was useful an API to detect if a client was faking their user agent or was a bot. When I worked for a neo bank we abuse all the APIs to detect if client was a real person or not without having to use captchas.

Yeah you could use the vibration API and accelerometer API as a very low bitrate TX/RX system for devices on the same table and close enough.

No permissions required.

I vaguely recall there being some early-days accelerometer-based webapps that absolutely destroyed batteries, because the high-resolution accelerometer checks required responsible throttling / debouncing. So gating it behind permissions makes some sense to me.

USB/Bluetooth is underrated because it means you can ship hardware products that can have their firmware updated or connect and sync with a web service without having to build/ship/maintain a whole app for it that will eventually stop working after an OS update.

Hell, you can even root an android phone via the browser! https://protonaosp.org/install/web

Is Bluetooth good yet?

I had issues as recent as last year's new products.

But otherwise I love the concept of hardware access with HTML. The embedded guy in me thinks the future is going to be crazy. I can't quite wrap my head around the possibilities.

My guess is that hardware access with HTML will mostly bring about remote exploits and massive privacy problems. I disable all of it.

I also keep Bluetooth disabled on my mobile devices. It's used extensively to ID and track people and their devices. For things that don't move and are only ever paired to a single thing (like a speaker) it works fine. Most of the complaints I hear about bluetooth are from people who pair multiple devices to a single source and want to easily switch between them.

Any former geocities member us surely aware of the MIDI capability!

Not just playing MIDI files, but interfacing with MIDI controllers (including ones that weren't designed to be accessible over the web leading to RCE).

Couldn't you play a WAV too? But they were too massive at the time for most peoples bandwidth.

<bgsound>

Unfortunately many of these leak identifying datapoints so due to abuse they are now blocked.

Most of these are not available in chrome or firefox.

A lot of those are Chrome-only.