Re: making the webcredits.org spec more strict about 'source' and 'destination' fields.

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 9:32 AM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>wrote:

> We could add a vocabulary term for IOU or Credit or Debit to the
> PaySwarm vocabulary if that would help matters - Melvin, thoughts?


One of the thing that bugs me a little about OpenTransact is that it uses
negative numbers. I think the use of negative numbers in these
specifications is a doorway to confusion.


> or maybe it's unspecified who owes who the 5 euros? maybe we need to
> leave it open. ;)
>

No, a Transfer in PaySwarm is directional - source -> destination.


in a jargon without negative numbers, that means that some amount of
something fungible is debited from the source and credited to the
destination.



The Web Payments Community Group is a loosely knit group that is
> actively working on standards related to payments and finance on the
> Web. PaySwarm is one of those specs. So is WebCredits, so is
> OpenTransact (although, there is another mailing list for the
> nitty-gritty on that). I'd like to think that this group is welcoming of
> all open financial standards that would like a clear pathway to
> standardization at W3C.
>

I'm still making nomenclature decisions for use in the
tipjar.commarketplace documentation. So I've thought through a lot of
these
terminology questions but don't have an authoritative centralized dump of
them yet, at least not one that I'm proud enough of to want to share as
such.

-- 
In this document, the key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL",
"SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
"OPTIONAL" are to be interpreted using situational ethics.