Re: [w3c/browser-payment-api] PROPOSAL: A new document structure for this API (#138)

> Create a new payment mediator specification that defines the conformance criteria for any mediator (not just a user agent in this role).

Generally +1, but I'm struggling to understand exactly what language and how the conformance criteria would work for such a meta spec. For example, the algorithm used to select payment apps being placed in a payment mediator spec makes sense to me and I know what that would look like. 

How a payment request is handed off to a Web-based payment app via HTTP is not clear to me and the only language I could think of putting in such a spec would be a bit toothless/generic. Maybe that's fine, but a more concrete spec would help me understand this a bit better.

>  Migrate the appropriate elements of the API specification into this new specification.

What are the appropriate elements? Which sections would move to this new payment mediator spec? Also - whatever happened to "payment agent", I find that wording better than "payment mediator" as 'mediator' tends to imply that there is conflict.

> Make the new specification a normative dependency of the API specification.

+1 if we can figure out the bits above.

> Update the API specification so that it describes the conformance criteria of a user agent in assuming two roles:
> Payment mediator (as defined in the payment mediator spec)

+1, again if we can get the wording right, which I'm concerned about. We'd want to make the HTTP API dependent on the mediator spec as well.

> Data collection mediator for collection of data to optimize the checkout flow.

-0.5 - we're not chartered to build a generalized data collection mechanism. I get that doing that is the best way to design this shipping address collection mechanism that Google/Microsoft are proposing, and maybe that should be another sign that what we're attempting to do there is problematic. We should either commit to doing a generalized user-provided data collection API (and spin up a separate WG to do that), hand this over to the Verifiable Claims group, or keep this API highly specific and very narrow in the payment request API.

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