Re: Proposal: Adopt 'facilitated payment links' work under WPWG

Hi Adrian,

That's an interesting thought, thanks for raising it! To be clear, it would
be up to the Web Monetization editors to propose the WPWG also adopt that
work, if they wanted to do so, and up to the WPWG to discuss in the same
manner as for facilitated payment links. If you're interested in pursuing
that, I think it would be useful for the Web Monetization folks to give an
update to the WPWG on where the specification is at, any recent progress,
etc - similar to what we heard from facilitated payment links this week.

In terms of the overlap: from the Google side, we view Web Monetization as
related but distinct
<https://github.com/WICG/paymentlink/blob/main/docs/prior_art_considerations.md>,
such that I wouldn't propose to combine them. While the underlying
technological implementation may be very similar (<link> elements), the
purpose/product goals of the two seem notably different. Facilitated
payment links are supporting a similar goal as the Payment Request/Payment
Handler specifications - one-off payments that require active user
interaction to complete. Facilitated payment links also deliberately (and
like PR/PH) gives the browser a lot of leeway in deciding what scenarios to
support, whereas as far as I know Web Monetization is and has to be more
specific about requiring the browser to handle ~all Web Monetization links
and be more involved in money flows.

To be clear, that last paragraph is my/our opinion and shouldn't stop the
WPWG from discussing any of this! I just think it's a separate discussion
at this time :).

Thank,
Stephen

On Fri, 31 Jan 2025 at 09:15, Adrian Hope-Bailie <adrian@fynbos.dev> wrote:

> Hi Stephen,
>
> Given the strong overlap in the two specifications, and given that the
> existing incubation tools would be the same (e.g. the web monetization
> browser extension), would it make sense to also add Web Monetization to the
> WPWG charter.
> I suspect that there is a potential path to adoption for both proposals
> that ends with a single specification.
>
> Adrian
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 31, 2025 at 3:56 PM Stephen McGruer <smcgruer@google.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> As you may know, we (Google) have been developing a specification for
>> 'facilitated payment links' in the WICG -
>> https://github.com/WICG/paymentlink . Junhui presented an update on it
>> in yesterday's WPWG meeting (minutes
>> <https://www.w3.org/2025/01/30-wpwg-minutes.html#a59a>, slides
>> <https://www.w3.org/2025/Talks/google-paymentlink-20250130.pdf>), and we
>> really appreciated the interest, discussion, and questions we received out
>> of that presentation.
>>
>> Out of this, we would like to propose moving the 'facilitated payment
>> link' work from the WICG to the WPWG. It seems a fairly clear fit to me,
>> given the overlap in scope and also the potential for building a clearer
>> relationship between 'facilitated payment links' and existing WPWG-driven
>> APIs (Payment Request, Payment Handler). The initial output of the
>> 'facilitated payments link' work is likely to be a spec change to the HTML
>> specification (as that is where <link> elements are specified), but I could
>> see future extensions to Payment Request and Payment Handler too.
>>
>> I believe that adopting 'facilitated payment links' into the WPWG would
>> require rechartering the WPWG, as our current charter is tightly restricted
>> to SPC, Payment Request, and Payment Handler. I'm not sure of the process
>> here in gaining group consent (or not!) to either adopt 'facilitated
>> payment links' or to re-charter, so hopefully Ian can help guide us along
>> the way! :)
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Stephen
>>
>> --
>> smcgruer • he / him
>>
>

-- 
smcgruer • he / him