ESP8266 Community Forum

just wondering about the viability of running an html5 terminal emulator off an esphttpd (something like gateone http://liftoffsoftware.com/Products/GateOne ) but simpler.

if it is doable it would make for a great wireless/IP to serial bridge for people working on PBX systems, managed switches etc, if you could plug it in, connect to the ESP AP and use the terminal directly from a browser.

edit:
just thinking about this a little more if the ESP is running in AP mode it could also hijack all web traffic (like those hotel web access systems) and drop you into the console page. Meaning you can just connect to the network. open a browser and bang you have a console up to whatever device you have the ESP plugged into.

Except for not having the terminal javascript the esp-link firmware allows you to get pretty close. You'd have to use a regular terminal program (such as iterm on mac or putty on windows) and connect to port 23.
The javascript terminal emulation stuff should be easy to load but I would guess that it's pretty large. So unless you use a module with 4MB flash you can probably forget about OTA firmware update.

There also are smaller ones, eg this one looks like it may fit. The best way to implement this would be to have esphttpd support websockets; at the moment it does not do that yet.