RE: Payment Method Identifiers

Zach and I discussed this before he sent this mail so I support the proposal.

A couple of additional thoughts:


·        The short string list below effectively covers 5 organisations. Our goal should be to drive this list to zero before Candidate Recommendation.


·        One of the motivations is to not get into the “short-string registry” business. Any time someone wants to add themselves to the list, they just need to mint a URL and we will use it.


·        For now, we are only discussing these strings as identifiers. In the future, though, we will no doubt discuss what resources the URLs might point to. If we use the relative URL approach that I proposed in Option 1a then this potentially puts a lot of network load on whoever hosts the base URL.

This was a problem in the past when W3C hosted DTDs and XML namespace schema (in the past, Microsoft’s network was regularly rate limited to w3.org because of errant software running on machines behind our proxies that was frequently downloading schema definitions).

From: Zach Koch [mailto:zkoch@google.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 3, 2016 6:04 PM
To: Payments WG <public-payments-wg@w3.org>
Subject: Payment Method Identifiers

Hi all -

I want to once again jumpstart the conversation around payment method identifiers. My hope is that we can reach some form of consensus over the next couple of weeks, as I think it's one of the major parts of the browser API spec that we still don't have a firm answer on.

In short, I want to propose a modified version of Option 1b<https://w3c.github.io/browser-payment-api/specs/method-identifiers.html#option-1b> in the current spec<https://w3c.github.io/browser-payment-api/specs/method-identifiers.html>. Namely, I think all payment method identifiers should be absolute URLs, but I do not think we should try and maintain a short identifier registry (at least, not in the long run). We do need to bootstrap the ecosystem, however, without waiting for the major payment methods (e.g. visa, mc, etc) to define those URLs.

To that end, I would propose we define a (very) short list of payment methods that we write into the spec as a means of jumpstarting things, but that we plan to remove them as soon as the short-listed schemes provide an absolute URL that can replace them.

My proposed starting list:

visa
visa-debit
visa-credit
mastercard
mastercard-debit
mastercard-credit
unionpay
unionpay-debit
unionpay-credit
amex
discover

My hope is that in the not-too-distant future we're able to remove these short codes from the spec and instead rely on the schemes themselves to provide the absolute URLs for these, e.g. https://visa.com/payment-methods/visa-debit (or similar).

I think relying purely on absolute URLs has a number of benefits, but I would encourage your feedback. Hopefully we can find some time on the call on Thursday to discuss things in more depth as well.

Thanks,

Zach