Kent,
I probably need to apologize for the cross posting to PEM-DEV regarding
Internet EDI. My message was in response to a posting on the 822 list from
Bob Kummerfeld in Australia suggesting the creation of new MIME content
types for EDI. I had thought it might be of interest to the PEM community
but neglected to mention the original message which occasioned the posting.
I am currently aware of 3 projects underway to do EDI on the Internet and
simply wanted to suggest that we seek a rational approach to the problem.
Regarding the online version of the 435 documents you mentioned, I spoke
to our ISO rep here who does have some electronic ISO documents here but
apparently this is a sore spot with him. Something about copyright problems.
In regards to the work on the X.400-PEM profile , I think this sounds like
a good idea and understand the problems you mentioned. You should be aware
that ISO has a notion of two user agents however. One is the traditional
IPM-UA (P22 via P1/3/7) and an EDI-UA (Pedi/P35 via P1/3/7). In that sense
ISO recognizes EDI as a co-equal requirement to inter personal mail. I think
I understand the genearl structure of a MIME-PEM based mail system and believe
that we can create an Internet EDI-UA where more of the ISO Pedi Service
Elements are realized in the Internet EDI-UA because of the differences in
X.400 MTS and Internet.
I received a very heavy mail response to my posting of yesterday so it does
appear that there is some interest in the topic but I understand your
comment that EDI is just one of many applications which employ the Internet.
We probably need to take this thread off of pem-dev, unfortunately I don't
know where to go. I spoke to our mail sysadmin and he tells me it would be
easy to set up a new mail list but I'm not sure what the IETF protocol is
in this regard. Perhaps someone can enlighten me...
... lew