Re: Markup for payable HTML resources

On 18 November 2015 at 00:37, Meinhard Benn <meinhard@satoshipay.io> wrote:

> Hello fellow web payment enthusiasts,
>
> I have been reading this list for a while and I'd like to introduce
> myself and ask for your opinion on an issue I'm currently trying to
> resolve.
>
> I am the founder of SatoshiPay and we are looking at making paying for
> web content as frictionless as possible for all parties involved. As our
> payment layer we chose bitcoin payment channels (a simple "smart
> contract" on the bitcoin blockchain), because of its extremely low
> transaction fees - think fractions of a cent. Our system works without
> any download or sign-up for the end user, because we ship a complete
> bitcoin wallet written in JavaScript with the website the payable
> content is on and instantly create a private key if the user doesn't
> have one yet.
>
> To make a simple integration for the content publisher or merchant as
> easy as possible we simply added a few data properties to HTML tags,
> which will be parsed by our JavaScript widget. In code it currently
> looks like this:
>
> <div class="satoshipay-content-item-text satoshipay-masked"
> data-content-url="http://will.satoshipay.eu/api/v1/article?id=4ypNl2BMe"
> data-satoshipay-id=563cc11c8c823d110025e951 data-content-length=1170
> data-price=4000></div>
> <script src="https://wallet.satoshipay.io/satoshipay.js"></script>
>
> Dump this anywhere on any website and it will just work. Your payments
> will be donated to our office coffee fund. :)
>
> Some documentation for the enriched div tag:
>
> <div
>   /* trigger class, plus design */
>     class="satoshipay-content-item-text satoshipay-masked"
>   /* content URL after payment */
>     data-content-url="http://.../article?id=4ypNl2BMe"
>   /* product ID at SatoshiPay */
>     data-satoshipay-id=563cc11c8c823d110025e951
>   /* content length (for text) */
>     data-content-length=1170
>   /* price in satoshis (0.00000001 bitcoin) */
>     data-price=4000
> >
>
> What's happening in the http://will.satoshipay.eu/ example is that after
> top-up the JS bitcoin wallet connects to the SatoshiPay server via
> WebSocket, negotiates the smart contract and moves funds to a multi-sig
> bitcoin address. With each payment the contract gets adjusted and a
> payment certificate is issued to the client by the SatoshiPay server.
> This certificate (currently a pre-shared secret) is shown by the client
> to the content server, which then ships the content. At no point
> SatoshiPay ever holds control over funds. We are merely the broker.
>
> Now, while the payments work fine, there are a few issues with the
> markup above as it's neither flexible nor consistent. So that's my where
> my question starts. My current idea is to redesign as follows:
>
> <div
>   data-sp-type="text/html"
>   data-sp-url="/paid-content/1?spCert=%s"
>   data-sp-id="563cc11c8c823d110025e951"
>   data-sp-currency="XBT"
>   data-sp-price="0.00004"
>   data-sp-length="1170"
> >
>
> Improvements:
>
>  - there is a vendor prefix
>  - different text types could be rendered and styled differently
>  - the position of the SatoshiPay payment cert in the content retrieval
>    URL can be controlled by the publisher
>  - different currencies are supported
>  - price denomination meets a standard
>
> A payable image could look like this:
>
> <img
>   data-sp-type="image/png"
>   data-sp-url="/paid-images/1?spCert=%s"
>   data-sp-id="abcdef"
>   data-sp-currency="XBT"
>   data-sp-price="0.00006"
>   height="600"
>   width="800"
> >
>
> Video/audio tags and download links would follow a similar pattern.
>
> So, I was wondering, did you spend some time on thinking about a
> standard for this already? The only W3C resource I found is a retired
> draft from 1999: http://www.w3.org/TR/Micropayment-Markup/
>
> On https://www.w3.org/community/webpayments/ I see a lot of JSON, but no
> HTML markup.
>
> Other thoughts? Are we thinking the right direction here?
>

I tried using microformats for payments but it turned out to be a bad fit.

Have you considered RDFa?

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/


>
> Cheers and thanks for listening, Meinhard Benn.
>
>
>