WebID-ISSUE-14 (bblfish): WebID and Browsers [use cases]

WebID-ISSUE-14 (bblfish): WebID and Browsers [use cases]

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/track/issues/14

Raised by: Henry Story
On product: use cases

SSLv3/TLS have been in available in browsers for over 13 years. But client certificates without WebID only make sense for very large organisations with very strong security requirements. As such browsers have not put as much energy into User Interface issues that a large consumer public requires as they could. There is perhaps not that much to do - fixing a few bugs, a few clever improvements - but these could help make a big difference to adoption once it has broken through the initial adoption phase.

The group should put together some report on the state of the situation there. Perhaps opening a wiki page on the WebID wiki would be a good start.

The ESW Wiki has a section on Clients
  http://esw.w3.org/Foaf%2Bssl/Clients

As a follow up to a longer article on identity in the browser
http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/identity_in_the_browser_firefox

I posted ideas in the guise of a bug report in Issue 29784 on Google Chromium
 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=29784

A major benefit of client certs will of course be especially valuable on cell phones, or any device where typing is difficult. The iPhone experiment a few years ago was an eye opener. It helped make WebID self explanatory in 1 minute. http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/one_click_global_sign_on
Sadly the iPhone OS then broke SSL client certs, and this stopped functioning.

Received on Monday, 31 January 2011 14:06:18 UTC