Keygen tag in HTML5

Question

So I came across this new tag in HTML5, . I can\'t quite figure out what it is for, how it is applied, and how it might affect browser behavior.

Answer 1

You're missing some history. keygen was first supported by Netscape when it was still a relevant browser. IE, OTOH, supported the same use cases through its ActiveX APIs. Opera and WebKit (or even KHTML), unwilling to reverse-engineer the entire Win32 API, reverse-engineered keygen instead.

It was specified in Web Forms 2.0 (which has now been merged into the HTML specification), in order to improve interoperability between the browsers that implemented it.

Since then, the IE team has reiterated their refusal to implement keygen, and the specification (in order to avoid turning into dry science fiction) has been changed to not require an actual implementation:

Note: This specification does not specify what key types user agents are to support — it is possible for a user agent to not support any key types at all.

In short, this is not a new element, and unless you can ignore IE, it's probably not what you want.