[w3c/browser-payment-api] Currency Types and Rendering (#185)

I have some concerns with being able to sensibly render line items, especially with the “currency” field being *effectively* free-form (the current version says that it may be but does not have to be an ISO currency code).

Simply stated, no one using a US locale checking out from a US store expects to see “58.73 USD,” and this will certainly confuse some people. They’ll want to see “$58.73”. But if there’s no hard-and-fast convention about what “currency” means, then rendering this sensibly will be difficult. So, minimally, I think we need to say that anything that matches an ISO code *is* *guaranteed* to be that currency.

Without strictly requiring the currency code to be an ISO-registered value, though, this becomes problematic: any other three-letter code effectively becomes “squatting” in the space, and runs the (admittedly small but nonzero) chance of being later allocated by ISO. Which means that what we really want is some way to say “this is the ISO code for a currency”, and a mutually exclusive way to say “this is not represented with an ISO code, but with a different identifier, which is XXX.”

There's probably more thought to be given to these non-ISO identifiers in terms of renderability, but I'm mostly worried about the conventional currency cases to start with.

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Received on Tuesday, 10 May 2016 22:52:12 UTC