Re: Dealing with the NASCAR Syndrome for Web Payments

On 15/04/14 15:57, Dave Longley wrote:
> On 04/14/2014 08:07 AM, Anders Rundgren wrote:
>> http://iiw.idcommons.net/OpenID_the_Nascar_Problem_Revisited
>>
>> Is this something the Web Payment CG has looked into?
>>
> Yes, it's been on the radar for quite some time now and we've had a
> number of different conversations about it. This includes (at least)
> talking about integrating Web Payment Providers with Web Intents (or
> similar), using navigator.registerProtocolHandler, and using the
> approach outlined in one of Manu's blog posts here:
>
> http://manu.sporny.org/2014/credential-based-login/
>
> With credential-based login, a browser API (that can be shimmed using
> JS+telehash) could be made available to vendor sites that would
> automatically determine the user's IdP which could, in turn, be queried
> for their Web Payments provider.

Web Intents is currently stalled, but there is some hope yet for a 
similar approach, e.g. Mozilla's Web Activities.   However, it may also 
be practical to have a domain specific solution for payments. Web 
Intents assumes the browser plays the role of broker between providers 
and consumers of services.  Synchronization across personal devices is 
devolved to the proprietary synchronization mechanisms  provided for 
browsers from the same vendor.

Wallets offer a richer solution for the intermediary between web 
applications requesting payments, and payment solution providers, and 
open the way to a richer user experience and compelling value added 
services.  There is a lot of work on wallets, but right now, web pages 
are strongly coupled to wallets, so we have a NASCAR problem for web 
developers in listing all of the wallets and all of the independent 
payment solutions that the web site supports.   This points to the need 
for an open standard that decouples web pages from wallets and payment 
solutions, and which minimally constrains how wallets and payment 
solutions are implemented, e.g. locally or cloud-based.

-- 
Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett

Received on Tuesday, 15 April 2014 15:15:03 UTC