The new release of the Firefox Information Card add-on recently announced by Axel Nennker is notable not only for its features, but also because it incorporates contributions by Andy Hodgkinson of the Bandit Project that make it work with the DigitalMe Identity Selector. This means that the same Firefox add-on can now be used with at least three Identity Selectors — openinfocard, DigitalMe, and Windows CardSpace.
The benefits of sharing this core piece of Information Card infrastructure became apparent when some recent releases of Firefox broke the add-on in some scenarios. Because several copies of the code were in use by different projects by then, all the projects had to make their own fixes in their copies, both duplicating effort, and increasing the chances that different selectors would behave differently in quirky and non-obvious ways. I’m really pleased that Andy pitched in and contributed his fixes to the add-on project and that Axel incorporated them in a way that I believe means that DigitalMe won’t have to use a separate add-on anymore. Hopefully the other identity selectors will also follow suit soon, eliminating any unnecessary forking in this key project.
One nit with Axel’s post though… While he suggested calling the add-on “CardSpace for Firefox”, even though I’m a fan of CardSpace, the add-on is intended to work with any Identity Selector — not just CardSpace. Therefore I’d prefer selector-neutral names for the project like “Firefox Information Card add-on”, “Firefox Identity Selector add-on”, “Information Cards for Firefox”, etc. What selector-neutral term for the project do others prefer?
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