[OpenID] UI extension... useful with popup blockers?

[Martin Atkins]

Andrew Arnott wrote:
> 
> Has anyone else run into this issue?  Are there any workarounds or
> approaches I'm not seeing?
> 

Some ideas spring to mind. None are brilliant, but it's a start...

  * Initially show the action button on your OpenID login form as 
disabled. When the user types an identifier, do some kind of background 
request to your server to have it do discovery and return the result. If 
discovery failed, highlight the field as being in error. If discovery 
succeeded, determine what size window to use based on the UI extension 
results. On success, enable the action button to allow the user to 
submit the form.

This is challenging because it blocks the user from continuing until 
discovery has completed. However, this experience is similar to that 
used by many sites when they verify that an account username is 
available for use before allowing the registration form to be submitted.

However, it also has the advantage that you can give the user feedback 
about an invalid identifier without a full page round-trip.

  * Pop-up the window at the small size with some content loaded from 
your own domain. Have that content do discovery. If it turns out that 
the provider does not support the UI extension, serve up some JS to 
resize the window before redirecting to the OP. If discovery fails, 
serve an error message.

The UX here sucks in the case of an invalid identifier. It also may be 
jarring to have the window suddenly resize.

  * Do the entire login process in a pop-up window. If you put your own 
login page in a pop-up window then you don't need to worry about opening 
one later. As in the previous idea, you can serve some JS to resize the 
window after discovery if needed.

Since the user was already using the pop-up window, it'll hopefully be 
less jarring when it's resized.

If you can process the login without reloading the calling page, this 
might provide a superior user experience since the user can log in 
without losing state.