Re: Call for Single Media Type Design for Payments

On 12/28/2013 05:03 PM, mike amundsen wrote:
> Think of this as a kind of "HTML" for payments. A single payments
> media type would be able to express all the payments vocabulary
> (data) and handle all the possible use cases (actions).  Client apps
> would only need to "recognize" the data and actions and could work
> with any server regardless of the data that appears in a response or
> the order of the actions for any server.

Mike, Steve, Anders,

This is very close to the design behind many of the specs that this
group is working on. The markup mechanism is JSON-LD, which uses a
payments vocabulary to express assets (things for sale), listings (the
terms under which a sale can occur), and digital receipts (the result of
a transaction).

You operate on these documents by just using standard HTTP action verbs
(GET / POST / DELETE / PUT / etc.).

If you haven't already read these articles, they may help you understand
how everything fits together (currently, anyway):

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/04/web-payments-with-payswarm-identity-part-1-of-3/

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/04/payswarm-part-2/

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/04/web-payments-with-payswarm-purchasing-part-3-of-3/

Mike, we can do all of this without the need for a mimetype by using
just plain 'ol JSON-LD. Here's how you'd describe an item for sale, for
example:

https://web-payments.org/specs/source/vocabs/payswarm#Asset

or the terms under which it can be sold:

https://web-payments.org/specs/source/vocabs/payswarm#Listing

or the digital receipt of sale:

https://web-payments.org/specs/source/vocabs/payswarm#Contract

We could create a mimetype, but it's largely unnecessary.

I'll leave this here for now, don't know if you were aware that we're
already well down this road (and headed down it almost 4+ years ago).

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: The Worlds First Web Payments Workshop
http://www.w3.org/2013/10/payments/

Received on Tuesday, 31 December 2013 18:52:23 UTC