Re: Concern with basic ebXML TRP Syntax/Semantics]

[Betty Harvey <ebxml@eccnet.eccnet.com>]

On Thu, 6 Apr 2000, Michael Champion wrote:

> I *hope* that widely supported IETF standards such as MIME fall into the set
> of "XML and related Web technical specifications".  XML has a feature called
> NOTATION that does more or less what MIME does, but is much less widely
> understood and supported.

I am not a member of the transport working group - I have just been
lurking.  Please excuse the interruption |-).  MIME and NOTATION
are two different things.  Notations in XML allow you to address
and include another type of data into your XML stream.  Notations
are application dependent because the data itself (i.e., picture,
movie, sound, etc.) is not transformed into anything else.  The
application decides what the file is and how to interact with
it.  

The U.S. Department of Defense and DoD Contractors were working closely
with the IETF several years ago on the multi-part MIME for the packaging
of SGML (XML's parent) specification. DoD has many of the same problems
that you are currently grappling with.  How do you package and send XML
data and associated files (graphics, animations, sound, etc.).

I have to admit that I haven't looked at this specification was when I was
working an an industry standard many years ago and searching for the
appropriate packaging spec we could just plop in.  You may want to look at
MIL-PRF-1840C just to get a feel for how they handled this problem.  One
of the specified ways of packaging DoD data is multi-part MIME.

In the packaging you have to look at packaging, multiple XML files
that may not be related to each other but you want to package them
together and also XML Entities which are referenced in the document
declaration subset.

Betty

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Betty Harvey                         | Phone: 301-540-8251 FAX: 4268
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