Billto
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RFC34252 describes the Billto: HTML tag, intended as a replacement for the now-deprecated Mailto tag.
RFC34252
Network Working Group A. Ralsky
Request for Comments: 2368 Internet Mail Consortium
Updates: 1738, 1808 P. Moshou
Category: Standards Track World Mail Direct
A. Vitale
Expedite Media Group
July 1998
The Billto: URL scheme
Status of this Memo
This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Unsolicited Mail Society (1998). All Rights Reserved.
Purpose:
The billto: tag is an HTML element of the class hyperlink. Its function is to
allow a visitor to a webpage to charge the site owner for goods supplied.
Background:
Whilst taking of payment online has always been possible, it has often involved
extremely circuitous and inefficient methods. The billto: tag seeks to streamline
these methods, eliminating most if not all of the inefficiencies of its
predecessor, the mailto: tag.
Function:
A website visitor, clicking on a billto: tag, will be presented with a dialog
asking how much money to extract from the website-owner's credit account. It is
envisaged that the payee's software will already have been programmed with the
details of the bank which is to receive the money, thus it should not be
necessary to enter this information repeatedly. On pressing 'OK' the transaction
will take place electronically, with no requirement for paperwork or other
delays.
Basic Structure:
The standard billto: tag has the form
<a href="billto:MR S SAMPLE {1234-4321-2343-2222-3333}">Charge Me</a>
where the components are the name and number of the owner's credit card.
Enhanced Structure:
Developments in banking have however brought with them the need for enhancements
to the billto: syntax. With most credit cards now carrying a PIN and a validation
number, it has become necessary to provide additional data-fields, but at the
same time maintaining compatibility with equipment which does not understand
these new developments.
<a href="billto:MR S SAMPLE {1234-4321-2343-2222-3333}"?PIN=1234&VN=987>Charge Me</a>
As you will see, special fields now exist to carry this additional information.
Useage:
In a typical online trading operation, a web-crawler or 'spider' will traverse
the Internet, finding sites with billto: tags. The contents of these tags will be
recorded. They will then be checked for legitimacy, and any bogus or zero-credit
examples filtered out. Once the validity of the billing-information had been
confirmed, your package of V*8gra will be on its way to you, with payment taken,
automatically and painlessly, from your account.
Advantages:
The advantages of this method should be self-evident; not only will you never be
in the unfortunate situation of running-out of V*8gra again, but the utilisation
of, and impact upon, Internet resources involved in maintaining your daily supply
will be drastically reduced, perhaps by as much as a factor of one thousand over
the previous mailto: approach. This in fact is the key reason for the
introduction of the billto: mechanism, as the traffic created by the previous
mailto: approach to online pharmaceutical merchandising was threatening to bring
the entire Internet to a halt.
For Comparison:
To understand the benefits of the billto: tag, some consideration must be given
to the existing business-model of its predecessor, the mailto: tag. Here,
operations typically proceed as follows: Harvesting of email addresses (instead
of credit card numbers) is performed in a broadly similar manner to that proposed,
using web-spiders. Success is however constrained by the fact that RFC2368 -the
de-facto standard for the mailto: tag- makes no specific requirement for
website-owners to include mailto: tags in their pages, thus many sites do not
carry any, wasting the webspider's valuable time. Additionally, an issue
immediately arises with the collected email-addresses in that it is not possible
to validate them in any way for correctness. Thus, many may be deliberate
forgeries, or 'munged' addresses.
In order to effect any online transaction it is then necessary to email the
collected addresses, and wait for a reply - preferably a reply which includes
the requested creditcard details. This is an inefficient and resource-hungry
process which can delay the sending-out of the goods by several days. Even at
that, it has been found that a very high proportion of recipients fail to reply
at all to the email. This represents a huge wastage of Internet resources, not to
mention a loss of profit for online merchants.
Apart from the obvious efficiencies of direct billing, other advantages also
accrue, for example RFC34252 has been carefully drafted to avoid the previous
oversights, and thus requires all W3C-compliant webpages to contain al last three
billto: tags. Furthermore, the use of any kind of obfuscation technique -such as
including _NOCHARGE_ in the number- has been specifically prohibited, as has the
generation of the tag itself by way of Fortran, Lisp or other 'web-backend' code
intended to fool the visiting webspider.
Legal Considerations:
Webmasters and designers should familiarise themselves with the new requirements,
especially the mandatory requirement for an adequate number of
properly-constructed billto: tags on all sites. It should be noted that failure
to comply in this respect carries almost as heavy a criminal penalty as the
omission of an <alt> tag from a graphic.
RFC34252 ~ ~ Network Nonworking Group.
