Here I am creating the Web Monetization Specification documentation and the additional pages I consider necessary.
I am currently working on the following pages.
I split the topics into three phases: December 2021, January 2022, and Februari 2022 and beyond. The first two phases are part of my current contract.
I decided to fully focus on monetization streams for the first two phases. Other methods of payment (batched, tipping, Payment Request API) will be postponed, mostly because I don't have the time or the functionalities are not yet fully defined - let alone implemented.
Create the core documentation about the spec + API, introduction to Interledger and monetization streams, and example scripts.
Explore further topics: browser support, payment pointers, the Coil extension and backward compatibility, and adress issues web developers have with Coil.
Explore complicated topics that are of secondary importance to web developers.
This phase is not covered by my current contract - though I will move topics to phase 2 if they turn out to be easy.
The purpose of this documentation is twofold.
In order to gain acceptance the WMS must be documented according to the MDN guidelines. Also, the documentation needs some example scripts.
This documentation will provide that.
If we want to win web developers’ enthusiastic support we have to provide them with a clear and complete overview of what web monetization is, how it works, where it’s implemented, and what other technologies it uses or is dependent on.
While all of this is described in some form somewhere, right now this documentation is a confused, unsearchable jumble of sites, pages, and other resources that mostly don’t refer to one another and that no one who doesn’t already knows their way can find their way in.
The main culprit is the artificial division of the documentation into unconnected silos, one for each participating company or organization (Coil, Interledger, the specification, payment pointers, and so on). This way of offering information does not work. Readers don’t care which silo a particular bit of information belongs to.
This documentation aims to provide a clear, complete overview in one place. Web developers must be certain that, once they have read through the entire documentation site, they know at least the outline of every aspect of web monetization.
Topics that web developers need to use in their daily work, such as the API, will be treated in detail. Topics that web developers only need an overview of, such as Interledger, will be treated in less detail, and will refer to their own documentation.
For now I split the documentation into topics I can study and describe one by one. Right now each topic has its own page, but that is a temporary measure — not all of them will necessarily have their own pages in the final version.
Once most topics have been written we’ll decide on the exact composition of the final version and the order of topics.
Topics I’m not currently working on: