Re: [TC Admin] MIME type for UBL documents

On Mon, Dec 12, 2022 at 7:59 AM David Goodenough <david.goodenough@broadwellmanor.co.uk> wrote:

As you might recall I have written (and am close to releasing) an email based UBL document management application.Â

I need to be able to mark the attached document so that if you choose to Open it from your mail client (or browser) my application gets started.Â When the volume of documents is high, I would suggest the use of a dedicated email address for such documents, and my application would receive all the mail to that address and process it as UBL, but for small users who only get a few documents per day that might be difficult to set up and the extra work of Opening the attached document (or dragging and dropping or cutting and pasting it to an open copy of my application) might be simpler.

The rules for MIME types give me only option, application/xml (or text/xml they are apparently regarded as the same these days), but this is used for all manner of document and I only want UBL documents sent to my application.

There would be the option of using application/ubl+xml, but that requires IANA registration which I would guess is a long process.

There is however another possible place in the MIME definitiins that I could use, application/vnd.oasis.??? which currently has subtypes of vnd.oasis.opendocument.??? , but nothing for UBL.ÂÂ

Would it be possible for the UBL committee to ask the Oasis TC (tc-admin@oasis-open.org who IANA say is responsible for vnd.oasis) to add a UBL equivalent of opendocument?Â I think that this only requires allocation by Oasis, but the TC would probably know the process they went through with OpenDocument and thus what would be required for UBL.Â I have copied tc-admin on this email for their comment as well.

I see no point in marking each UBL document type individually (i.e. application/vnd.oasis.ubl.invoice separate from application.oasis.ubl.order), so we only need one entry, application/vnd.oasis.ubl and the receiver can then use the XML document to route appropriately.

Personally I also consider that using the full application/vnd.oasis.universalbusinesslanguage is too verbose, and .ubl will suffice, but I don't think there is a limit on the length of a MIME type, and it would always be machine generated so there is no real scope for it being miss-spelt.

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