No XHTML at Information Card Tile Page

Is it only me who finds it anoying that Microsoft over and over again produces example pages that have very very illegal (X)HTML code?

The example page for the Information Card Tile has yet several errors that occure when one uses a framework to create HTML pages that simply does not work well.
One should think that Microsoft's programmers have access to tools that produce valid code?! Or maybe all the Micorsoft tools and frameworks are so that they produce invalid code when you include one page into another?

Bad example. Although I like the Information Card Tile. Even though I would implement it in another way. Some time ago I came up with the same idea but did not implement it because that would have been "not standard". Well, now it seems we witness the birth of a new standard.

I would implement the Information Card Tile á la microformats by using the class attribute. I would add a special class to the HTML-image tag to denote a tile.

If the RP does not want a tile when no selector is installed then:
Example: <image class="InformationCardTile" src="" id="the-ppid" alt="invisible"/>

If the RP does want an image when no selector is installed then:
Example: <image class="InformationCardTile" src="http://rp/image.png" id="the-ppid" alt="Purple Information Card Icon" onclick="submitForm()"/>

The selector would then overwrite the src-attribute when the card with the PPID "the-ppid" exists and add an onclick-handler that starts the selector or sends the card if the user has chosen to always use this card.

openinfocard logo

<Update count="2">


The top three logos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
</Update count="2">


<Update>: Um... The two logos probably violate the usage guidelines of the information card icons...
So let's use this logo

</Update>
Projects seem to need a logo. I hope that this quick (non-art) work finds some supporters.

Or should should it be this one?

SAML ECP Firefox Extension

This is cool. I was thinking of giving this a try myself. An identity selector that speaks SAML instead of WS-*. This should not be that complicated when you mix the openinfocard selector with a java SAML library. Add ingredients, shake well, stir, ready. I am wondering if they took the photo shot before or after they began this project.

OpenID leads to Information Cards

After a long pause you can hear the voice of the master of the identity metasystem again here. Kim Cameron explains why the success of openid leads to the success of CardSpace information cards.

Some sometimes forget that there are "alternative operating systems identity selectors". Examples are of course the openinfocard identity selector or the higgins based identity seletor digitalme. Which Kim mentioned in his post too.

Yahoo Information Card?

It has a long tradition to put question marks after the headling in big letter newspapers...
I was just reading that Microsoft is offering to buy Yahoo. And after much tataa for Yahoo's OpenId initiative I am wondering when Yahoo will support information cards. But even Microsoft is not very fast with supporting information cards at e.g. MSDN, MSN or liveid...

tataa = "Probably onomatopoetically for the sound of trumpets announcing someone's appearance or a circus stunt or whatever."

Information Card ASN.1

Currently I am looking for a more compact format for information card .crd files.
Because I am working in a telco environment for 10 years now ASN.1 comes to (my) mind.

So I tried to feed identity.xsd to an xsd-to-ASN.1 translator.
First by uploading just the identity.xsd file. -> no luck here.
The translator does not revolve the urls of the required other schema definitions.

• identity.xsd
• oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd
• oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd
• ws-addr.xsd (www.w3.org/2006/03/)
• ws-policy.xsd
• ws-trust.xsd
• xenc-schema.xsd
• xmldsig-core-schema.xsd

Because of this I put all these files into one zip archive and upload it to the translator.
Again, no luck. There are conflicting definitions for wsa (schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/08/) in identity.xsd and ws-trust.xsd and the translator does not like that. Don't know whether this is an error in the ws-trust or identity schema definitions... Mike is checking on this. I am sure he knows (as always) the right person to answer information card deep-dive questions. Maybe the translator has an error?

To produce information card ASN.1 I tweaked ws-trust.xsd to use the same definition for wsa as identity.xsd. This time the translator likes the input and produces ASN.1 files. These are not for the faint of heart. But actually no human wants to read ASN.1, right?!

Next step: Feed the ASN.1 files into an asn1 to java compiler/translator.
OSS Nokalva has a nice trial version for this task.
I produced a bunch of java classes which nearly all compile nicely. There is one small glitch with xs:unsigned_long's max value but this is easy to fix.

Why am I doing this? Because I am working on information card support on mobile phones and network speed and computing power in this area are not funny. Have to see where this ASN.1 road leads to... Probably to nowhere because the midlet size exploded after integrating the generated java files. And the obfuscator (ProGuard 4.1) blew up too. So back to square one...

ID Selector Beta Version Regression

How and when to trigger the id selector is --- complicated ---.
Two beta versions back I introduced primilary code to handle javacript triggering better. Well, since then the openinfocard id selector started to dislike our own xmldap.org relyingparty, which uses the plain old style recommended in "A Guide to Supporting Information Cards within Web Applications and Browsers as of the Information Card Profile V1.0". Thanks Pamela for notifying me.
After two nights of fruitless tries to fix this I decided today to go back two steps.
I made a backup of my current local code repository and retrieved a fresh copy from the public google code repository to build a "working" version again.
You can download it (xmldap-0.9.8.200710291053.xpi) here.

As I am considering myself as an eternal optimist... here a small outlook which features might make it into the next (sans-micro-)version.
- no-SSL support
- better javascript id selector triggering