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From: solomon@CS.WISC.EDU (Marvin Solomon)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso.x400
Subject: Re: concise format
Message-ID: <8910291208.AA04063@gjetost.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 29 Oct 89 11:08:09 GMT
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(I just know I'm going to regret jumping into this debate, but here goes...)
Perhaps part of the problem is that use of the term "address" leads people
to look to the postal service for analogies.  In fact, the "O/R address" is
much more nearly analogous to a telephone number.  In the United States,
it's been about 30 years since we banished letters from phone "numbers"
and settled for a uniform 10-digit numbering system, and so far as I know,
so has the rest of the wold.  If you want a concise format
for writing O/R addresses on business cards, the only criterion for
"user friendly" is how hard it is to transcribe from the card to your
favorite mail user interface.  To this end, it would appear that brevity
is paramount.  It would also appear that inclusion of punctuation and
whitespace, which people are in the habit of considering to be relatively
insignificant, should be avoided.  If I have to transcribe the phone number
"1 + (608) 262-1204", it's clear to me that I have to get every single digit
exactly right, but the rest of the characters can be safely ignored.
Punctuation can't be avoided entirely, but things like double and tripple
slashes are likely to cause problems.  Multiple consecutive periods (full
stops), are worse.  Significant whitespace should be avoided at all costs!

I have long thought that one of the biggest mistakes in the design of 822
was that message headers are all printable ASCII.  That decision has seriously
impeded the development of decent mail user interfaces, since it led people
to the mistaken conclusion that they didn't need any special tools to
display messages (or even compose them!)--any old text editor would do.
The user-chummy nature of O/R addresses leads to similar mistaken conclusions.
I'm no more likely to guess the O/R name of someone in France
than I am to guess his phone number.  If I want to call Cristian, I
I will either have to get his phone number from him over some out-of-band
channel (e.g. in a letter-head -- or an email message :-), or from directory
assistance.

X.400 mail interfaces that provide nice menu-oriented entry of O/R addresses
do more harm than good.  If I get an O/R address on a business card and
my mail interface allows textual entry of O/R addresses, there's at least
some chance that I will correctly transcribe the string and that my mail
interface program will be able to parse it.  But if all I have is a "friendly"
fill-in-the-form interface, *I* will have to parse it, to figure out which
piece of it is the ADMD, which piece is the GenerationalQualifier, and
so on.  Much of the recent discussion on this list seems to be trying
to figure out how make the concise format sufficiently user-friendly that this
this parsing process will be easy for naive users.  That's patently ridiculous.

I close with a joke I heard recently.  Stop me if you've heard this...

	X.400 novice:  Someone who has no idea what an ADMD is.
	X.400 expert:  Someone who knows what an ADMD is.
	X.400 guru:  Someone who admits he has no idea what an ADMD is.

Marvin Solomon
Computer Sciences Department
University of Wisconsin, Madison WI
solomon@cs.wisc.edu, uwvax!solomon