Re: [Fwd: UAGL/Micropayments dependency.]

Hi Amir,

Thank you for answering my question. I am looking at the 9 June
draft of the Micropayment Markup spec [1], in section 4.5, which
I believe to be the pertinent section. Some comments:

1) The current text begins:

    "The price parameter, which takes a character string,
     displays the amount and currency to the Customer."

   I propose that this be changed to:

    "The price parameter, which takes a character string,
     specifies the amount and currency that the Customer
     will be charged upon dereferencing the link."

   (Question: How does caching work? Is this dealt with elsewhere?
    I'm sorry if this is not a pertinent question.)

2) Perhaps there should be a reserved value for non-fee links.
   For example, "0", with no currency specified. This would be
   more international than "free", for example.

Please let me know if these comments make sense. Thank you
again, 

 - Ian

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-Micropayment-Markup-19990609 

amir.herzberg@il.ibm.com wrote:
> 
> Ian says,
> 
> > There's a dependency between User Agent (Accessibility
> > Guidelines) and Micropayments: users agents must be able
> > to indicate to users that following a link will require
> > them to pay a fee. The question is how to indicate
> > to user agents that a link is a fee link. For example,
> 
> Actually I believe we have addressed this perfectly well in the existing
> markup proposal. Specifically, per-fee-links have been defined in a
> _different_ way than regular (free) links. Indeed we even gave some
> guidelines as to how the user agent (in our case we call this agent the
> `per fee link handler`) is to indicate the fee. However of course for
> accessibility reasons, special per-fee-link-handlers may implement special
> ways of indicating fees (e.g. for blind users). In summary - I believe
> you'll find our existing recommendation is fine
> regarding this particular comment. Your feedback on this and other points
> welcome!
> 
> Best Regards,
> Amir Herzberg
> Manager, E-Business and Security Technologies
> IBM Research - Haifa Lab (Tel Aviv Office)
> http://www.hrl.il.ibm.com
> New e-mail: amir@il.ibm.com
> New Lotus notes mail: amir herzberg/haifa/ibm@IBMIL

-- 
Ian Jacobs (jacobs@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel/Fax:                     +1 212 684-1814

Received on Monday, 28 June 1999 13:43:24 UTC