Can HTML5 communicate with peripherals like scanners and credit card readers?

Question

My company writes software that installs on client machines to perform point-of-sale transactions. The software interfaces with a variety of external peripherals (receipt p

Answer 1

This is possible, but it would have to be done indirectly. In theory, you could write a socket-server in a low level language, which gets I/O, and sends the I/O through the socket (relaying, I guess). HTML5 uses WebSockets, or some equivalent to communicate with this socket-server.