Re: [paymentrequest] Should well-known identifiers be used for ubiquitous payment methods (#35)

To build on what Shane is saying - this doesn't have to be an "either this or that" decision. We can easily have both (and this is what the Web Payments CG proposals have been suggesting for 4+ years now).

If you use a data format that supports "terms" that map to URLs (like JSON-LD), you can easily do both. With the example of JSON-LD in mind, do this in the JSON-LD Context:
```javascript
{ 
...
"paymentInstrumentType": {
  "@id": "https://w3c.org/ns/webpayments/v1#paymentInstrumentType",
  "@type": "@id"
}
"Visa": "https://visa.com/vocab#Visa"
...
}
```

and then your JSON data ends up looking like this:

```javascript
{
...
  "paymentInstrumentType": "Visa",
...
}
```

So, you get the three desired benefits: 
  * easily readable for developers
  * completely unambiguous for machines
  * decentralized innovation (Visa gets to own their terms, standards orgs gets to own their terms, each can innovate at their own pace)

Here's a link to a working example in the JSON-LD playgrond: http://json-ld.org/playground/#/gist/51e1b98df0906c2f793c

---
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/WICG/paymentrequest/issues/35#issuecomment-169343703