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Comment by romaniv | Hacker News Reader

I think the general idea of building better auth into browsers is a wonderful and highly necessary development. However, this implementation will completely fail if the user has JavaScript blocked and there is no fallback. And yes, this is a real issue. (Though I will probably get a lot of replies that try to dismiss it in various ways.)

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That's a great point. Persona doesn't work well in non-JS, non-browser contexts, yet. The nice thing is that you can use it for progressive enhancement. Users have JS? Auth with Persona. Users don't have JS? Use a traditional email address / password system.

So long as you can associate email addresses with accounts on your backend, you can use Persona with the same database you have right now.

Persona doesn't work well in non-JS, non-browser contexts, yet.

So are there built-in, HTML-only versions for this in the works? It seems it should be possible to build some of this functionality into the browser, making it work without JS.

The nice thing is that you can use it for progressive enhancement. Users have JS? Auth with Persona. Users don't have JS? Use a traditional email address / password system.

I wouldn't call that progressive enhancement. Depending on whether the client has JS enabled, they would go through entirely different registration and auithentication processes, using different credentials. That can be very confusing to the users.

Is there any way to use it for say an iPhone app interacting with web services authenticated as a user?

There have been iPhone (pancake) and Android (soup the AMO marketplace) apps and you can find the source in github.

We're working on an iOS SDK, to make this polished and easy.

Patches welcome, get involved!

* mozilla.dev.identity mailing list * #identity on irc.mozilla.org

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