Nonstandard Web MIDI APIs

[Si Robertson]

Hi guys,

Why are some of the Web MIDI APIs nonstandard in Chrome?

Here's a snippet of the specification ...

interface MIDIAccess : EventTarget {

  readonly attribute MIDIInputMap  inputs;

  readonly attribute MIDIOutputMap outputs;

};

In Chrome, inputs and ouputs are functions() and they return arrays. Has this been done intentionally or are the specifications changing too quickly for the guys implementing these APIs?

[Adam Barth]

WebMIDI is in development and not yet shipping.  We're tracking the specification in our implementation, but not everything is perfectly up to date.  I wouldn't worry too much about it until we get closing to shipping the feature.

Adam

[Chris Wilson]

+toyoshim

The spec has been changing, and the implementation is catching up.  The work is scheduled, but the Web MIDI eng effort is largely 20%.

The Map-like design was an early exploration of Maplike classes - so on the eng side, it's an interesting challenge to catch up with.  But the goal to do so is definitely there.  As Adam said, before sending intent to ship this will definitely be fully resolved.

[Si Robertson]

Awesome. Thanks for the feedback, guys.

[Takashi Toyoshima]

Hi, thank you for being interested in Web MIDI.

I'm preparing API updates to follow the latest spec, but it causes a compatibility break and also depends on coming new JS spec partially. So, I'm carefully taking it not to cause unnecessary compatibility breaks in the future, as I did on Promise before.

FYI, here is a revision of Web MIDI spec which Chrome implements now.

http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/WebAudio/web-midi-api/blob/35c89e62a77051afd8df3636b9c1dcf52eeb40d1/index.html

And you can check working in progress issues here.

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list?q=Cr%3DBlink-WebMIDI

--

Takashi Toyoshima
Software Engineer, Google