Re: Web Payments - 21 years ago

By "you", I assume you mean the WG (or at least the IG who chartered the
WG)?

I think you have misunderstood the way the WG specifications will play out.

Let's look at what is being standardised (ignoring for a moment the
pre-payment stuff like registration):

1. A very high level flow (request from payee -> response from payer) all
other comms are out of scope and hanlded by the payer (or their
wallet/app/agent) and payee (or their PSP/bank etc)

2. The messages that form part of this flow. Although clearly these
messages will be "envelopes" for payment method specific data as required
by implementors.

3. A WebIDL API that allows a UA to mediate the flow of messages between
payer and payee.

In the "app" world (mostly only on mobile platforms) nothing is stopping
implementors from simply passing the request received by the browser on to
the mobile platform so that the standard app selection pattern can be used
to allow the payer to select the payment app they want to use.

On the desktop (where this pattern is less well defined) I expect that
these will be "Web apps" (i.e. hosted by a PSP and served via HTTP to the
browser that will render the UI defined by the PSP in HTML).

Browser vendors may choose to allow hosting payment apps "in-the-browser"
but that is not guaranteed and need not be offered at the expense of other
options.

My feeling is that this architecture accommodates such a wide variety of
deployment scenarios that it will be able to leverage the platform
neutrality of the Web but also the various benefits of "native" where
appropriate.

On 12 November 2015 at 10:59, Anders Rundgren <anders.rundgren.net@gmail.com
> wrote:

> On 2015-11-12 09:09, Adrian Hope-Bailie wrote:
>
>> A New York Times article from 1994 describes the first online payment:
>>
>> http://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/12/business/attention-shoppers-internet-is-open.html
>>
>
> For on-line payments (and reservations) using credit-cards and not relying
> on a
> super-provider, nothing has really changed during these 21 years.
> Considering its
> importance these days, I'm inclined to say that things have rather gone
> backward :-)
>
> The only noticeable action is on the "App" side which makes me wonder why
> you
> didn't consider hooking into this force instead of betting on a "Browser
> Wallet"
> which will be difficult to standardize [1] and keep up-to-date with the
> market,
> while the "App" folks can do updates whenever there is a need.
>
> Cheers,
> Anders
>
> 1] with respect to
> - Payment UI ownership/branding
> - Deployment model
> - Possibly different flows of information
> - Possibly encrypted data
> - Enrollment
> - Security solutions
> - The desire among payment providers keeping their code secret
>