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The Payment Request API [PAYMENT-REQUEST-API] requires that merchants supply a list of identifiers for supported payment methods. This document defines those identifier strings and how they are created.
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This specification was derived from a report published previously by the Web Platform Incubator Community Group.
This document was published by the Web Payments Working Group as a Working Draft. This document is intended to become a W3C Recommendation. If you wish to make comments regarding this document, please send them to public-payments-wg@w3.org (subscribe, archives). All comments are welcome.
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This section is non-normative.
One of the principles of the PaymentRequest API is that merchants must know how to accept payments from the payment methods that they claim to support. This allows the API to abstract away the details of specific payment methods and to add new ones over time without changing the API specification.
As part of the paymentRequest() call, the web page provides an array of strings that identify the supported payment methods. This document defines those strings.
This specification relies on several other underlying specifications.
The Payment Method Identifier is a string that uniquely identifies a payment method that a user can use to complete a transaction. For example, Visa, MasterCard, and American Express are payment methods used in some countries.
Payment method identifiers are strings containing a URL. The string MUST be an absolute URL.
When the PaymentRequest API is invoked, the web page provides a list of identifiers for supported payment methods. The user agent must compare these identifiers to those available to the user and use this to filter what the user can select. To determine whether two identifiers match, perform the following test:
The following issues are tracking aspects of the payment method identifier specification:
A registration mechanism may exist to install the code for new payment methods into the user agent. This process would add support for a new payment method to the user agent. This mechanism should be defined in a separate specification.
There is an initial outline making a proposal.
There is an open issue about whether payment method identifiers should resolve to a resource if they are URLs.