Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!emory!wuarchive!usc!jarthur!ucivax!gateway
From: nazgul@alfalfa.COM (Kee Hinckley)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso.x400
Subject: Re: Is X.400 good for international mail?
Message-ID: <910108094122.13454@alphalpha>
Date: 8 Jan 91 15:32:56 GMT
References: <1900.663307743@nma>
Lines: 49
Approved: usenet@ICS.UCI.EDU
In-Reply-To: <1900.663307743@nma>
X-Mailer: Poste


> What you aree asking for is that LOTUS and other vendors get themselves
> in gear and define their objects in ASN.1 and assign Object Indentifiers
> to them.  This has to be done by the "ouwners" of the objects, such as
> LOTUS, et al.
First of all, most of the owners have never *heard* of Object Identifiers
and could care less, so it's going to be a long time if we wait for them.
Our customers need the identifers *now*.  So we're just going to have to
do it ourselves somehow.  (BTW, I don't think it's necessary to define the
objects in ASN.1, I forget the phrase (I haven't been dealing with the X.400
side of things that much) but I believe there's some way of saying that
it's simply an object known at both ends and unspecified in the middle.
Otherwise we'll *never* get Object Identifiers for those things.)

>  The standards specify how this should be done, and enable
> the "owners" to do it.
At some point in the system you need to get an object identifier to
start with.  You can't just gen it up out of thin air, since it might
conflict with someone elses.  Who do you go to in the US to get that
identifier?

>
> >>for a long time. With T.61, every country is expected to define
> >>its own subset for national use, which can be handled by the
> >>terminals used within that country.
> >Who is doing this in the U.S.?  (This stuff all seems so easy when
> >you are talking about countries where the Post Office is the Phone
> >Company is the sole provider of such services.  It's not that neat
> >here.)
>
> I expect that it is already done in the US, since the US uses IA5
> (ASCII).  So, what do you want someone to do?
Okay, that's fine.

>
> A more interestinng question is:  "How are we in the US going to deal
> with allll those none ASCII characters that need to be displayed in mail
> from our foreign correspoondents, and need to be typed on our ASCII-only
> keyboards in order to send mail to them?"
Got me, I don't do dumb terminals (yet).  I do X, and _most_ of that is
being done in X11R5 (except that they still haven't got the right-to-left
stuff covered very well yet).  But I thought that wasn't a problem for
headers, just body parts?  My understanding was that headers have a limited
character set (otherwise known as "screw the foreigners").  That actually
hasn't seemed to bother the Japanese people we've talked to, except that they'd
really like to have Kanji subject lines.

Caveat.  As I said, I haven't been dealing with the X.400 mechanics myself,
just the user interface to them.