Just Released: W3C Web Payments Polyfill and Demo (video)

Hi Web Payments WG and WPIG (bcc'd),

Exciting news. The engineering team at Digital Bazaar has been hard at
work creating a production grade polyfill for both the Payment Request
API and the Payment Handler API in Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Firefox.
We're announcing a beta release to developers today.

An introductory video giving some background as well as recordings
showing it working in all major browsers can be found here (6 minutes
runtime):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb-gWT1t1Rg

What does this mean for the W3C Web Payments work?

* When the polyfill hits production, we expect that ~90% of all browsers
  (roughly 2.8 billion people) will immediately get support for the Web
  Payments APIs across desktop and mobile browsers.

* Web developers won't need to wait for browsers to implement the latest
  Web Payments API in order to deploy to their customers. Instead, the
  polyfill will provide missing browser features until the browsers
  support them.

* This will enable us to more rapidly test and deploy new payment
  features, greatly reducing the cost of innovation in the group, and
  enabling more people to participate in the design and development
  process.

* The polyfill is one more implementation of the specs.

What is next?

* We'll continue to harden the polyfill for production usage.

* We plan to provide technical review feedback on both specs after
  having implemented them.

* We'll pick an open license that works for all orgs and implementers.

* We still need to implement some simple things, like better
  animations/transitions when selecting payment instruments and things
  like shipping address selection.

* There are some issues in Safari that require preference changes that
  we're trying to work around.

* The foundation of the polyfill is, as predicted, almost exactly the
  same as the verifiable claims polyfill, which may have repercussions
  for how these sorts of APIs are designed at W3C. We'll produce a
  report detailing the similarities before W3C TPAC.

We'll bring up these topics as the work progresses in the WPWG. This
email is just a heads up regarding this new capability for the Web
Payments groups.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Rebalancing How the Web is Built
http://manu.sporny.org/2016/rebalancing/

Received on Wednesday, 6 September 2017 19:16:56 UTC