Some starting points from JEPI

In our e-commerce work, we outlined a demographics facility that might be  
integral to the shopping experience. Here were some of my comments:

>  ...
>  2) Automated Form Fill-In
>
>  As an aid to e-Commerce and payment-support, we could
>  provide automatic hooks in the browser to fill-in name,
>  shipping address, etc.  We managed to pull this out of
>  discussions of payment protocols by citing the approach
>  noted by Dan Connolly and myself: designate a set of
>  field-names that can be defaulted by configuring a client.
>
>  Thus, any FORM with a text field named (say)
>  http://pep.w3.org/AutoFill/FName could have a default
>  value supplied automatically by the user's browser.  This
>  can be implemented completely by browsers.  We should
>  suggest this to the HTML ERB.
>
>  3) Demographic Profiling
>
>  XXX, in particular, identifies a need to know a few things
>  about the customer almost before shopping even starts,
>  in order to filter products not available, calculate
>  local currency prices, etc.  They are driven by actual
>  customer concerns; but the details of what should go into
>  this information is unresolved.
>
>  Protocol Name: http://pep.w3.org/Profile
>
>  Standard Parameters: {age int}
>                       {residence country-code state-code}
>                       {delivery  country-code state-code}
>                       etc.
>
>  We might consider adding parameters for use when
>  requesting a profile:
>     {policy
>      http://pep.w3.org/Profile/WillNotRedistribute.html}
>
>  Rohit is extremely skeptical about creating this protocol;
>  it has the "build it and they will come" risk: just using
>  it will make it the default demographic-disclosure
>  protocol for many other uses.  It should be tied to
>  developments in the Demographics area. In particular
>  advertisers have expressed interest in standardizing
>  things like the policy parameter alluded to above.
>
>  It seems logical that parameter included here should only
>  be those that can't (easily) be used to identify an
>  individual.  Individual identification is better done by
>  the default form filling stuff in 2) above.
>  ...

Reactions?

Rohit Khare

Received on Friday, 16 February 1996 14:30:40 UTC