In Context

I really enjoyed the EIC conference in Munich last week. I flew in just in time to attend the launching of the German chapter of the ICF (informationcard.de). That meeting far exceeded my expectations. It was written up in here in a Heise Verlag site, Heise Online.

Of the many good things, one stands out. At that meeting Axel Nennker demonstrated an iPhone-based selector app. After the meeting I asked him how it launched the selector since there’s no way (legally) to add an HBX-like plugin to Mobile Safari. The Higgins iPhone selector that Markus Sabadello created requires you to jailbreak the phone. Axel’s answer was simplicity itself: you just define a URI scheme (e.g. “icard:”) and you associate the selector iPhone app with this scheme. The “RP Security Policy” is simply encoded as a set of parameters. And you can return (or post back) the security token. Oh, and he said the same approach will work on Android.

So now the ICF (and then likely the OASIS IMI TC) just has to define how the “Relying Party Security Policy” is encoded. Having struggled with the limitations of today’s <object> tag binding that Microsoft defined, I’m much more interested in us using another suggestion of Axel’s, namely that perhaps the first parameter is the URI of an XRD document. That way the API will be permanently stable while we slowly add new parameters and functionality to the XRD. Furthermore, this is compatible with recent conversations with David Recordon, John Bradley, Drummond, Bob Morgan, and so many others about a common “RP discovery” document.