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W3C Sets Up Web Payments Standards Group To Improve Check-Out Security
campuscodi writes to note that the World Wide Web Consortium has launched a Working Group to help streamline the online "check-out" process and make payment by internet easier and more secure. The proposed standards will support a wide array of existing and future payment methods, including debit, credit, mobile payment systems, escrow, and Bitcoin and other distributed ledger technologies. The group estimates that the new payments API will reach browsers by the end of 2017. For more details, you can consult the Web Payments Working Group Charter, and the group's wiki FAQ page.
This won't help the poor and needy people who don't have access to debit cards and bitcoin wallets.
We should force rich CEOs to give out debit cards from their bank accounts, so that everyone can be free. It's only fair.
In 10 to 15 years we'll have a standard.
What payments challenges are of interest to W3C?
7. Merchant interest in loyalty coupons and other commerce tools, as well as smoother integration of payments into buying patterns that include search and social;
One of the primary goals of this initiative is to make it easier for merchants to track purchases and payments. Or for parties like google to profile you.
This initiative is not intended to benefit the consumer. It is all about benefitting big money interests.
I say that we should fix the real problem. The real problem is that I have to give my credit card number, or debit card number, or bank routing information to the store that I want to make a purchase from. I would much prefer to have a system, more like PayPal, where I can authorize a payment to an online store and not give them any information that would allow them to access my account to create further payments.
As soon as I submit my credit card number to a store, there's any number of things that could go wrong after that time that would cause my account to become compromised. Doubly so for things like debit cards or account routing information that would cause me to lose money from my actual account.
I'm not saying that PayPal should take over. However, there should be a standard way to make a one-time payment from any financial institution and it should work similarly to PayPal in that the money gets transferred to the seller without giving them any information that could be used to make another transaction that isn't verified by me.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
For about 20 years we've been begging users not to hit the submit button more than once, we've been hacking up javascript to hide the submit button, disable the submit button, and so on...
Can we please just add an attribute to HTML5.1 or whatever this will be in that indicates that the element should disable itself after use? I just discovered that onclick="this.disabled=true; dosubmissionthing();" will not, in fact, disable the button immediately and Chrome will queue up a second click if a customer double-clicks hard enough on a slow and shitty computer, because the DOM isn't updated until the handler is finished. I propose an attribute once (or once=once for the pedants): Prior to handling any other user requests, the User Agent SHALL set disabled to true for the element, then execute its onclick handler and/or default action if any. The attribute should be valid for any element that may have either an onclick event handler (eg almost all of them) or a default action (a,input[type=submit],input[type=image],etc)
If for some reason the user should need to use that element again, the element can have disabled set back to false.
This is something that honestly should have been done decades ago. Now is the time to fix it rather than expecting everyone to continue to halfass it in javascript incorrectly.