[whatwg] A few comments on the <keygen> tag

[Jonas Sicking]

On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 3:52 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Apr 2009, Anders Rundgren wrote:
>>
>> Now to the really problematic stuff:  <keygen> is not really an HTML
>> tag, it is actually 2 phases of a 3-phase key provisioning protocol.
>> I don't see why a protocol should be plugged into a page GUI.  The
>> alternatives all use APIs or specific plugins that indeed may be spawned
>> from an HTML page but that's something completely different.
>
> I agree, <keygen> seems like a poor design. That's one of the reasons I
> didn't extend it in HTML5; we're just defining what it does in browsers so
> that new browsers can implement it if they want to be compatible with the
> existing browsers.

We could possibly make it non-conforming though. I don't have a strong
opinion either way, on one hand I think we want to discourage its use
since it's a pretty crappy feature, on the other hand, I'm not sure
that the people that are using it have a choice, so making it
non-conforming without providing any alternatives isn't going make
anyone stop using it.

/ Jonas