W3C is pleased to receive the submission of "Using P3P for E-Commerce" from Microsoft and Citigroup.
The submission describes how to use P3P's extensible data schema mechanism to define data schemas appropriate for e-commerce applications. This kind of data schema extension is a good example of what the P3P extension mechanism was designed for. The schema is intended for use between clients and servers, which is the typical use of P3P, but also between merchant servers. This effort to coordinate expertise from the financial services and payment communities with existing W3C technology is a promising development in the effort to make the Web more attuned to both e-commerce and privacy needs.
At the time of this writing, the P3P specification has entered "last call", and is thus still subject to change. In fact, it seems likely that the specification will undergo changes that may significantly impact the specification in the submission document. These changes may involve both the syntactic form of the data schema mechanism and the particular base data schemas that are inherited or paralleled by this submission. The motivation for these changes is the need to coordinate P3P with forthcoming XML schema and RDF schema mechanisms. Furthermore, the ECML data fields, which this submission is based upon, were derived from the P3P base data schema, and both have the same internationalization issues to deal with. Thus readers should be aware of the need to update this document as the P3P specification develops toward a W3C Recommendation.
Readers are invited to provide feedback regarding this submission to the P3P working groups.
The participants of the P3P Activity are invited to review this submission for possible use in their work. In particular, the P3P Specification Working Group may consider whether this use of P3P is appropriate and whether it presents any difficulties or opportunities for improvement to the specification.
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specific action on a Submission.