[OpenID] An OpenID "mobile" Hint?

[Martin Atkins]

David Recordon wrote:
> Agreed, in a perfect world you'd have lots of OPs with mobile  
> experiences.  I guess part of what I'm thinking about is far less  
> around the technology and more around a forcing function to make it  
> very clear about which OPs support mobile and which don't.  In the end  
> hopefully getting us to that perfect world.
> 

I assume having read the various responses that what we're discussing 
here is selecting the RP selecting different provider if the the RP is 
an explicitly-mobile site, such as http://m.facebook.com/.

Now that I understand what you're trying to achieve, I can get behind it 
a bit more. I'm still not completely convinced that it's going to be 
that useful in practice, though: I know I generally use the main 
"desktop" version of most sites I visit on my phone, just because they 
tend to be more complete. I'd still prefer to see the a mobile-friendly 
OP UI, though.

Also, some sites will have their main site simultaneously be the mobile 
site by simply providing a mobile stylesheet and doing capability 
determinations in script on the client-side. Such sites would have no 
reliable way to determine whether to set this flag or not, and would 
presumably therefore always use the non-mobile version.

Finally, I'd be curious to hear which OpenID providers you percieve to 
have poor mobile experiences and what in particular makes them poor.

I think I'd prefer something that requires less disruptive changes to 
what an RP is expected to do, such as something similar to the language 
preference proposal where the RP sets a flag saying that it's a mobile 
site in the request which allows the OP to select a mobile-friendly UI 
if available. This gives the OP an opportunity to make the switch if 
necessary, and can be implemented as a standard OpenID Auth extension.

If a provider depends on some specific hardware to do authentication, 
then it's the responsibility of that provider to come up with an 
acceptable solution for situations where the user is unable to use that 
hardware for whatever reason.