Comments on message header spec., v.0-63, 7/27/00

[mwsachs@us.ibm.com]

COMMENTS ON MESSAGE HEADER SPEC, 07/27/2000


2.1  PRINCIPAL HEADER ELEMENTS

Line 163:  This states "any additional header elements are optional". This
use
of "optional" probably does not conform to RFC2119 since I assume that
"optional"
here means that the DTD specifies either "0 or 1" or "0 more more".  In
RFC2119,
"optional" means that an implementation may or may not support the feature.

In general, the term "optional" is problematical in XML with regard to
RFC2119
conformance because I find it very hard to write text about "0 or 1" or
"0 or more" without using the word "optional". I went so far as to consult
Roget's Thesaurus and could not find an acceptable synonym.  With regard to
"0 or 1" and "0 or more", an implementer should generally be required to
support the tag.  I suggest modifying the RFC2119 conformance statement to
say
"except for the word 'optional'" and to further state that when "optional"
refers
to a tag which may appear 0 or 1, or 0 or more, times, all implementers
shall
support this tag.  See tpaML draft ver. 1.0.6 for an example of such text.

Please scrub the spec for any other uses of "optional".

Since there are currently no such optional header elements, as far as I can
tell
from the DTD, an immediate solution is to delete the sentence containing
this
word at line 163.  However I recommend modifying the RFC2119 statement as
above
in order to be ready for the introduction of such optional elements.

4.  MESSAGE TYPES

Line 318:  What is "transport specific message"?  To me, a transport
specific
message is an acknowledgment or error message generated by the transport
protocol and having no content to be processed by the application.  Such a
message won't have an ebXML header or envelope and will be sent on the
connection created to send the message to which the ACK or error message is
responding.

4.1 WHAT IS A MESSAGE TYPE

Line 324:  What is "ebxml aware transport"?  This must refer to the message
system.
To avoid confusion, I suggest that the word "transport" be used only
to refer to transport-protocol functions (e.g. HTTP, SMTP) including the
communication protocol and associated security functions at this level
(e.g.
SSL).

Regards,
Marty