Re: Updates to Payment Apps wiki page

Hi David,

Ian is correct although I will add that the scope will affect the design
decisions we take which may be difficult to change in future.

My assertion is that we should focus on defining how a browser passes a
payment request over the Web (irrespective of how the app that receives it
is implemented). This implies that we need a platform agnostic mechanism
like HTTP.

The alternative is to focus purely on payment apps that run in the browser
in which case it might make sense to use a Javascript API to pass the
payment request to the in-browser payment app (although the HTTP mechanism
would still work it's no longer the only option).

If we go down the route of using a JavaScript API then we will require
browsers to add new integrations in future to support different payment app
implementation types whereas if we use HTTP then we can define this once
and it should support all future implementation types.

I think it's clear that I prefer the HTTP approach but I think we should
hear from the group if there are good reasons to limit ourselves to just a
JavaScript API.

I also note that the Browser Extensions CG [1] is starting to make progress
on a standard browser extensions mechanism which will be an interesting one
to watch wrt interfacing payment apps implemented as browser extensions.

Adrian

[1] https://www.w3.org/community/browserext/

On 10 May 2016 at 04:51, Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org> wrote:

>
> > On May 9, 2016, at 7:01 PM, David Ezell <David_E3@VERIFONE.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hello all:
> >
> > I have a question.
> > Ian wrote:
> >> This seems like a good WG call question: whether the scope of its
> initial work
> >> will be web-based payment apps or (the subset) browser-based payment
> >> apps.
> >
> > What does "initial work" mean, exactly, in terms of documents and
> rec-track progress?
>
> Hi David,
>
> Part of the exercise of creating this document [1] has been to help us
> establish a shared
> understanding of terms and scope.
>
> AdrianHB asks a scope question in the payment apps wiki: does the WG want
> to focus
> on browser-based payment apps initially (that is: those that run in a
> JavaScript environment
> in the browser), or a broader class of web-based payment apps (which
> includes the browser-based
> apps but also HTTP services, for example).
>
> Presumably the WG could choose to limit a “v1” Recommendation to
> browser-based
> apps, then build from there. Or the WG could choose to work on the broader
> class
> in v1.
>
> Ian
>
> [1] https://github.com/w3c/webpayments/wiki/PaymentApp_Notes
> --
> Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org>      http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
> Tel:                       +1 718 260 9447
>
>
>
>