On Thursday, August 16, 2007 8:02 PM, Clay Newton wrote: > I recently started compiling examples of trade examples, looking > at the potential for proposing a microformat, supporting the > trading of goods and record thereof. > http://microformats.org/wiki/trade-examples
Great initiative! I'm happy to see Bank of America supporting microformats. > Clearly, the receipt work is much more mature the trade > investigations to date. That said, it seems to me it > would make sense to merge efforts. I agree that the two areas have much in common. However, like Scott Reynen I'm not sure that there's enough common ground to aim for a single microformat. Having said that though, I think there are a couple of areas where thinking about the big picture would be useful: > The trade pipeline is (roughly): > Consideration > Purchase > Fullfillment > History > Examples of artifacts generated at each phase [...] > Wishlist / Estimate > Receipt / Invoice > Shipment Record / > Bill of Lading > Transaction Record Instead of a single trade microformat, we could think of a family of formats including the hypothetical receipt format. You might want to check out the overview of commerce formats that Rob Manson recently created at http://microformats.org/wiki/commerce-examples, which lays out such a family of formats. (It doesn't cover all the areas you mention yet.) It strikes me that the Wishlist/Estimate you mentioned might be implemented as a list of products (perhaps the proposed hProduct format). A similar list would be employed for receipts/invoices and shipment records. Some additional fields might be required in both cases: actual price (hProduct currently proposes MSRP) for estimates and invoices/receipts and quantity for invoices/receipts/shipment records. As for the actual transaction, I had earlier dismissed such a microformat. After reading your post I think it might actually be useful, both in your Transaction Record, for providing payment details in a receipt format, and for the transaction records mentioned on the trade-examples wiki page. One concern might be that a single format might be too broad and cover too many bases, so that's something that should be explored. As it is payment details on the gathered receipt examples are very credit-card centric, and I don't know how well that would mesh with, say, a bank statement. Looking forward to seeing how things turn out! Leif Arne Storset Technology Innovation Group, Intuit _______________________________________________ microformats-new mailing list microformats-new@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-new