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From: S.Kille@cs.ucl.ac.UK (Steve Kille)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso.x400
Subject: Re: Dutch names in X.400 and/or RFC 1148
Message-ID: <RFC-822:>
Date: 11 Jun 90 15:44:19 GMT
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In-reply-to: Your message of Mon, 11 Jun 90 11:07:04 -0000.
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Marv,

I wish that I could be as confident as you are about the "right" way to do
things.  You point out a number of very reasonable criticisms of structured
names in X.400.

Interestingly, X.500 moved awy from the X.400 approach to an unstructured
Common Name.  This is flexible, and useful for some aspects.  It gives
problems of managment, and leads to storage of too much data.  Alternate
values are a very serious problem.  Sometimes, the semantics of the
components would give useful information.

There are comprimises between these.  Your approach suggests an ordered
list, without giving semantics to the components.  The recent Xerox approach
has both forms available in parallel.  These seem to have some advantages
and disadvantages relative to the extreme approaches.

I remain to be convinced that there is a single "right" way of solving this
problem.   The different appoaches have varing (dis)advantages.


Steve