XML::Edifact

        an approach towards XML/EDI as a prototype in perl

        release 0.47 - character hander bug fix
        Thu Jul 31 19:10:43 CEST 2003

        (c) Michael Koehne, mailto:kraehe@copyleft.de


       Abstract

       XML::Edifact is a set of perl scripts, for translating
       EDIFACT into XML.

       0.47 is a bug fix to work around the character hander race
       condition in XML::Parser. Thanks to Sergey Groznyh <gsm@fct.ru>,
       who found and fixed the bug. I also migrated documentation from
       linuxdoc-sgml to Perldoc, as the former got obsolete.

       Introduction

       EDIFACT is often called "the nightmare of the paperless
       office" when you show a programmer the standard draft.
       Those 2700 pages of horror-filled advisory-board English
       have given many programmers headaches.

       EDIFACT is trying the impossible: a single form for the
       real world.

       Orders, invoices, freight papers, etc., always look dif­
       ferent, if they come from different companies. EDIFACT
       tries to fulfill all needs of commercial messages, regard­
       less of type and origin. Of course the real world is nei­
       ther simple nor complete.  Nevertheless, it's important
       for the top companies and their suppliers -  you know,
       those who have been in business for years and can pay for
       a mainframe and a pack of gurus.

       XML/EDI is meant to provide a simpler (KISS) format that
       can be translated to and from EDI, to allow smaller compa­
       nies to avoid slashing down forests and retyping into a
       computer keyboard stupid lines printed by other computers.

       This is NOT XML/EDI, it's certainly not KISS. The edi­
       fact03.dtd reflects the original words of the EDIFACT
       standard as closely as possible, on a segment, composite
       and element level.

       This DTD simplifies EDI inasmuch as it doesn't distinguish
       between e.g. INVOICE or PRICAT, but only defines a generic
       message type called edifact:message. The benefit is of
       course that it's possible to convert any EDI message into
       edifact. The drawback is that the dtd is really relaxed.
       Validation of EDIFACT message design can therefore not be
       done by a validating XML parser. Message designers will
       still need knowledge about EDIFACT message design and EDI­
       FACT tools.

       But once the message is designed, it's simpler to read it
       with XML.