More on Finance Sub-group comments - the Image/Picture Aggregate

["William J. Kammerer" <wkammerer@foresightcorp.com>]

Re: the ebXML CC Finance Sub-group's comments on the Aggregate Analysis
document provided by Marianne Cockle, at line 397 - the Image/Picture
Aggregate, in CCAnalysis_7_12-00_finance_comments.xls, at
http://lists.ebxml.org/archives/ebxml-core/200101/msg00026.html.

The Image/Picture Aggregate proposed by Finance includes three
components: (1) the Format - the electronic format of the image (e.g.
jpg, pdf.,…), (2) an  Identifier - The name or alpha-numeric string
which identifies the image, and (3) the Image - the data which makes up
the image.

The intent is clear - in that business documents will have all sorts of
reasons to refer to images or other supporting documents in the form of
jpegs, Adobe Acrobat pdf files, Word documents, etc.   But I would
suggest not including the actual image or document within the business
document itself.  Instead, an *external* reference can be made to
another MIME body part within the ebXML TR&P MS payload using a "cid"
URL, described in the Content-ID and Message-ID Uniform Resource
Locators; see RFC 2392 at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2392.txt.  For
example, a JPEG picture image would be "attached" to the MIME payload
envelope, and indirectly referred to by the business document using the
URL string "cid:2000-0722-161201-123456789@ebxmlhost.realm":

        --Boundary_(ID_rZCQj0ia1UzTFR4Q7NJaBg)
        Content-ID: <2000-0722-161201-123456789@ebxmlhost.realm>
        Content-type: image/jpeg; name=DSCN3385.JPG
        Content-transfer-encoding: BASE64

This is consistent with the way TR&P refers to external MIME parts,
where Section 8.3 - Manifest element - within the ebXML Transport,
Routing & Packaging Message Service Specification (Version 0.91), at
http://lists.ebxml.org/archives/ebxml-transport/200101/msg00010.html,
shows use of XLINK to refer to external documents.

William J. Kammerer
FORESIGHT Corp.
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