[Auth]Re: Auth digest, Vol 1 #22 - 8 msgs

[Ron Burk]

> So, how do you convince the vendors to cooperate?

You never know until you talk to them, but I think it's
strongly in their best interests. Passport is ultimately
a threat to their product. Supporting standards is
good for their products. To support everybody, they
currently have to resort to ever-increasing degrees
of hackery to figure out how to "automatically" talk
to a web form that was never designed for programs
to talk to (in fact, some sites actively try to code in
a way that prevents form fillers from working). I figure
there's a decent chance they will be happy to participate
in forming a standard, and then supporting it. If this
standard took off, that would let them spend more time
adding new functionality to their products, and less
time adding one more hack to work correctly with
weird web page #248 (that's my guess, anyway).

It also may be easier for them if a third party approaches
them about creating a standard. If someone with
a competing product calls you and says "let's make
a standard", you tend to suspect their motivation,
but since dotGNU doesn't really want to be in the browser
plug-in business, they may view the "intrusion"
into their marketplace positively.

Ron Burk
Windows Developer's Journal, www.wdj.com