Re: Role of secure stds in Internet EDI

[carl@xxxxxxxxx (Carl Hage)]

mjansson@agathon.com (Mats Jansson) writes:
: Are you saying that use of X12.58 could be and should be completely
: invisible to the UTA.  That would be nice.

I haven't read a recent X12.58, but since it is part of an X12 message,
it should be invisible to the UTA. The "X12 message" is what is transferred
by a VAN, less VAN (or other transport) specific headers/trailers.

On the other hand, not all EDI translators know about X12.58. Therefore,
it probably would be useful to add "Application/EDI-X12-58" (or something)
to explicitly note that the contents need to be fed to an X12.58 aware EDI
translator or preprocessor.

The EDI-X12-58 isn't strictly needed, since X12 itself is customized by
the ICs and TP agreements. Whether or not X12.58 is supported can be
just another part of the TP agreement. Adding EDI-X12-58 as a MIME type
might avoid some confusion, though.

: Then the question becomes
: whether to just endorse that method as the internet EDI method of choice
: or not.  I would opt for NOT, because of the same reasons you mentioned
: in your message.  But it might be important to recognize that people
: are free to use X12.58, and that really no special provisions need to be
: made on the SMTP/MIME side.  Am I getting the picture right?

Right.

I don't think X12.58 makes sense for EDIFACT, in any case. The EDIFACT
security solutions contained completely within EDIFACT would be applicable
however.
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Carl Hage                                              C. Hage Associates
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