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Cobranding Tips and Guidelines

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Cobranding Tips and Guidelines

By providing a cobranding template, you are accepting partial responsibility for the correct rendering of many Microsoft® .NET Passport network pages for your users. Microsoft .NET Passport network code cannot fully validate all possible combinations of HTML you provide for the various string variables, and will generally render supplied strings without any validation. Mismatched tags, text that overflows smaller text block areas, broken scripts, mixed-content warnings, unsuitably large images, and many other possible elements included as part of your template information could severely degrade the user experience on a .NET Passport network page. Test your templates thoroughly and make sure that all provided strings would render properly if fed directly to a browser as an HTML response. Test for all browsers that you plan to support.

Flexible-Layout Cobranding Example

When using flexible-layout cobranding, there are specific areas within each .NET Passport page that can be customized. The following screens show those areas and what you can do to customize them.

Passport Sign-in Page with Flexible-Layout Cobranding

.NET Passport Sign-in Page with Flexible-Layout Cobranding

The following example shows the .NET Passport Registration page, which contains the same header as the home page, as well as a customized color scheme.

Passport Registration Page with Flexible-Layout Cobranding

.NET Passport Registration Page with Flexible-Layout Cobranding

Cobranding and Browser-Specific Issues

There are some known browser-specific compatibility issues with cobranding. In particular, some older Netscape browsers cannot properly render the following tags if they are included in cobranding content or variables. Do not include the following tags unless your cobranding template specifically sniffs to identify the browser and excludes these tags whenever a Netscape browser is detected.

  • <SCRIPT>
  • <LINK>
  • <STYLE>

No SCRIPT Tags in Cobranding Template

The cobranding template file is called as the SRC attribute for an already existing SCRIPT tag in .NET Passport service pages that use cobranding. The supplied Cobrand.asp example file in the sample site uses a MIME-type return from an Active Server Pages (ASP) file to be served as a JavaScript file; however, you could also declare the cobranding template file to be a static ".js" file or anything else that, when called as a SRC attribute, produces the required JavaScript variables at page scope.

Double-Byte Characters and International Cobranding

Any double-byte characters used for international cobranding must be set as Unicode representations in the cobranding variables, not as plain ASCII. For more information, see International Cobranding.

See Also

.NET Passport Cobranding Overview