FPWD plan

Note: This is a draft plan for discussion at the 8 January 2020 card payment security task force call

Background

During TPAC 2019, the Web Payments Working Group expressed strong consensus to work on a payment method specification for SRC.

The revised 2019 charter of the Web Payments Working Group includes an SRC payment method specification as a deliverable. In the charter, we estimate that the first public working draft (FPWD) of this specification will be published in March 2020.

Here is a proposed timeline for a FPWD. This timeline reflects 8 Jan 2020 discussion.

Timeline

• January - March: Card payment security task force summarizes (1) target use cases, (2) user journeys including discovery and user identification, and (3) anticipated architecture —role of identifiers, manifests, etc. The card payment task force has been documenting user experience assumptions and requirements for SRC in order to reassure ourselves that the ecosystem will be satisfied with the Payment Request UX. We will summarize our conclusions and document "how it will work."
• 30-31 March: Discuss documentation at face-to-face meeting
• April - May: Assuming there is consensus, develop a payment method specification draft.
• Early June: Issue call for consensus to publish SRC as a FPWD.
• Last June: SRC published as a FPWD.

What is in a payment method specification?

The Basic Card specification illustrates the components of a payment method specification:

• Payment method identifiers (if any)
• Request and response data model. In the case of SRC, we expect to refer to the EMVCo specification as the authoritative reference. It is likely we will translate data types into WebIDL to enable validation services, etc. For previous discussions of the data model in Payment Request terms, see the SRC wiki.
• Algorithms related to Payment Request capabilities (e.g., canMakePayment, hasEnrolledInstrument, address selection events, etc.)