Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!dptg!rutgers!ucsd!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ncis.tis.llnl.gov!computer-science.nottingham.ac.UK!jpo From: jpo@computer-science.nottingham.ac.UK (Julian Onions) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso.x400 Subject: Re: concise format Message-ID: <392.624819951@cs.nott.ac.uk> Date: 20 Oct 89 11:50:00 GMT References: Sender: root@ncis.tis.llnl.gov Distribution: inet Organization: The Internet Lines: 39 Approved: post-x400@tis.llnl.gov X-Phone: +44 602 484848 (x 3595 or 2862) An interesting discussion the friendly O/R-name - can't help feeling we've been here before (several times). Two things to keep in mind.. 1) What do you do with weird addresses that include things like presentation addresses - I'm sure some implementor will look at the spec and say "wow - just what I need, we'll make presentation addresses mandatory in our system!" - suddenly a whole chunk of the community are not represented as the carefully learnt rules for business card address are not capable of representing presentation addresses. Presentation address are an extreme example - but, say, teletex is not unreasonable - similarly common-name is likely to be used I imagine. 2) On a similar point, what about repeated attributes - the concise format won't deal with multiple OU's will it? Or how about multiple OU's and just the surname + initials - how do you tell the difference. O/R-names are inherently key/value based - if you remove the key there are endless ways to cause confusion. As far as I can see - this is a short term problem anyway - surely X.500 will make this whole problem go away? I just give my postal address on the business card and let the user or mta look up the X.400 address. It's probably better to look at concise formats for X.500 names than X.400 names (which were never really intended for users anyway). It might just be worth picking the worst possible format as an interim to encourage a quick transition to use of directories. (a similar argument was suggested several times with RFC-987 I seem to remember - although I don't believe it was really taken seriously - despite the output!) Julian.