IBM and Hewlett-Packard's VeriFone subsidiary have agreed to make their respective Secure Electronic Payment software interoperable for credit-card payments over the Internet.
SET, which was initiated by MasterCard and Visa, accounts for the consumer (wallets), merchant (cash register), and banking (gateway) software that make up the system. The goal is to make the three components work together, regardless of which vendors' software is used.
IBM and VeriFone also plan to issue a Reference Guide so that SET-based software from other vendors will be compatible with their implementations.
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HTML 4.0 moves forward: The World Wide Web Consortium's HTML 4.0 working group brought the specification one step closer to an approved standard today by classifying it a "proposed recommendation."
HTML 4.0 was made a public working draft in July, and now the specification will be voted on, with comments, by the 220 W3C member organizations. Votes are expected within the next six weeks, after which the working group will make its final recommendation.
HTML 4.0 would add a variety of new features to the Web's core language, including cascading stylesheets, scripting, frames, multimedia, internationalization, and better support for tables and forms. (10.Nov.97)
