Thanks for the clarification Eduardo.
If that's the case then I don't see the big win here.
The old ebXML-ers (:-) were right when they divided the world into messaging, document, process, agreement, regrep.
Separation of concerns is a Good Thing.
Encapsulation is our friend.
And XML, with its simple, regular, universal structure (the well-formed document) is perfectly capable of supporting the combination of UBL documents as currently architected, with whatever "generic header" structure or generic envelope structure someone creates in the future.
I think the notion that the generic header design must infect er affect the document design is an artifact of pre-ebXML EDI-thought.
If you look at X12 with its mixture of transport, transaction, and document structures its pretty easy to see that yes, if you want to inject "generic messaging headers" in there you're gonna have to make space above the document level.
Which means you're gonna have to change the X12 standard.
Same for EDIFACT.
UBL on the other hand has no transport or transaction level information.
In the spirit of ebXML, UBL defines only document level terms.
Therefore, the only logical place to inject (messaging) headers would be outside the top-level UBL elements.
That being the case, UBL can remain blissfully decoupled from the generic header effort while fully supporting it.
No action is required on the part of the UBL designers.
If your messaging system needs to pass on generic header information to a back-end system, it can simply pass a document that looks like this: <foo> <generic-header-container> ... </generic-header-container> <ubl:Order xmlns:ubl="..."> ... </ubl:Order> </foo> -Bill
