Re: Credit-card payments on the Web - Stuck in its 1998 form

On 10/07/2013 01:59 PM, Alex Sexton wrote:
> I don't think we can consider the time since the keygen tag as the
> time it takes to get features on the web. We've had a *huge* uptick
> in standardization, and an even bigger uptick of evergreen (or quick 
> release) browsers to get these APIs in front of people within months
> of inception. This is vastly different than the way things used to
> work. It hasn't been 10+ constant years of effort. We've only
> recently set out to solve many of these problems.
> 
> All that to say is that with the right buy-in, the right fallbacks,
> and the right standards, we don't have to wait 10+ years to make a 
> significant change. HTML5 and CSS3 aren't but a few years old
> themselves and have seen massive adoption.

I just wanted to underscore what Alex is saying here. This is absolutely
correct, things are getting much, much better and there are strategies
that we can employ that don't require buy-in from major browser
manufacturers, large banks, or existing payment processors.

What Anders is outlining is frustrating, but this is how it's always
been. Rarely do the vast majority of web developers or people in
industry understand the problem a spec is trying to solve, or how much
better the spec will make the state of the art until it becomes
painfully obvious. Comments from the spec-writing sidelines are often
ignored unless you are deeply involved in the group.

Take JSON-LD for instance. A very small group of us (4 people) worked on
it part time (less than 5 hours per week) for a few years before it got
any attention at all. Many of the people that are now proponents of it
didn't really get the point of the specification in the beginning. Even
toward the end of JSON-LD's design work a few months ago, there were
only a few thousand people using it. Then Google adopted it and we went
from a few thousand people using it to 425 million.

It's hard to predict where the tipping point is going to be. Trying to
predict it is typically a waste of time. It's better to focus on the
problem and find a good, simple, and general technical solution to the
problem. The HTTP Signatures spec is a good example of this approach.

We all know that payments and crypto on the Web is badly broken at the
moment. The only thing that's going to fix that is actively working on
the problem, and to do that we need more people looking at the work
we're doing here.

This group was 1/4th of it's current size just last year. We've seen a
huge uptick in interest in this area. I remain optimistic, the
trajectory of participation in this group is going up. The more people
we have that are interested and passionate in this area, the more
technical work we can do in this area. Eventually, some of that work
will stick and make its way into the Web platform.

It doesn't take nearly as long as it used to to advance the state of the
art on the Web. Javascript can be thanked for much of this. Specs
typically go from start to finish in a 4 year timeframe, many are
implemented 2 years after the spec hits alpha... many of them as
javascript polyfills. We can take the same approach for much of the
payment tech we're talking about in this group. In fact, that's exactly
the approach that PaySwarm takes.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Meritora - Web payments commercial launch
http://blog.meritora.com/launch/

Received on Tuesday, 8 October 2013 03:32:22 UTC