Shibboleth.net discovery interface

[Cantor, Scott]

On 1/6/14, 2:02 PM, "Tom Scavo" <trscavo at gmail.com> wrote:

>On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 1:26 PM, Cantor, Scott <cantor.2 at osu.edu> wrote:
>
>Hmm, I'm not sure I understand the responses, so let me try again.
>When I click "Allow me to pick from a list," (which I don't routinely
>use, but I'm sure others do)

I can't imagine why anybody would use it ever. I could turn it off,
frankly, it's just there because it's a way of gauging how it behaves on a
data set that size.

>I can think of at least one alternative approach that is highly
>preferred (by me, at least). The list of IdPs could be presented as an
>ordinary HTML list (<ul><li>...</li>...</ul>) from top to bottom
>(doesn't matter how many there are). The content of such a list is
>immediately apparent (no extra click) and it's easy to traverse such a
>list since it's just an ordinary browser page. Indeed, I just grab the
>scroll box and scroll down to the bottom of the list in no time flat.

But it's just as useless as a tool for this purpose. Recall the concept of
the EDS in general. While this specific example is on a page by itself,
that's not really intended. I have to do that because Confluence and Jira
are so limited in their SSO capabilities.

The basic idea was that the UI for this would be embeddable inside some
other page's look and feel. In that situation, you can't do what you're
suggesting because it would throw off the surrounding design.

In this example, it wouldn't really do that, but that is why the EDS
doesn't work that way.

>Then I'm missing something since an HTML list is *much* easier to
>traverse than a drop-down menu. I can't believe I'm only one who
>thinks this.

Well, I definitely think they're both useless *in this context*. I don't
think your point in general, which is true, applies to this function
specifically. It could turn a bad interface into something slightly less
bad but no more effective for its intended purpose of selecting an IdP.
The only way you could find the one you wanted was to search the page of
links.

-- Scott