title: Can HTML5 communicate with peripherals like scanners and credit card readers?
body: <p>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 printers, bar code scanners, credit-card readers, etc). We do this with a WinForms app that we created in Visual Studio using the Microsoft OPOS library, which in turn communicates with our cloud server.</p>
  
  <p>There are obvious inefficiencies in this model, primarily with updates.  I'm researching other ways to communicate with these peripherals over the web, preferably via web browser. So far as I can tell, Java is one of the only technologies out there that can do what we're looking for (via applet), and I assume Adobe Flash can as well (via the Air platform).  These are viable, but not preferable because we want to run our software on web-enabled mobile devices.</p>
  
  <p>Does anybody have suggestions for other ways to communicate with external peripherals over the web?</p>