piet@cwi.nl (Piet Beertema) (09/19/88)
Unfortunately it's often not the technical, but the political people who make the decisions. The British choice of "gold 400" *with* a blank in it is a good example. Blanks are allowed in attributes because they make sense in written language. Think for attributes like locality or common name, it MUST be possible to express something like "stateName=United States of America". Why should that be possible? I fail to see any technical reason for having to use an elaborate attribute like that rather than the much more common "stateName=USA" in you example. I can think of lots of political reasons for the long form though. I only can see a striking resemblance with the domain notation, where ordinary users for obvious reasons use the "short form" only, the "long form" almost never being used and meant only to satisfy governing boards and that sort of people... From this point of view (from the human language upon the computer applications) the British choice for the blank is quite natural. In what way is "gold 400" any better than "gold400"??? Piet
jh@tut.fi (Juha Hein{nen) (09/20/88)
I agree with Tommy that blanks are indee needed and used want we them or not. So a way have to be found to live with them and not to try to deny the problem like Piet does. In our current gateway to a commercial mail network we succesfully map blanks to _s and I don't see why such mapping coudn't be made an explicit part of the recommendation. -- -- Juha Heinanen, Tampere Univ. of Technology, Finland jh@tut.fi (Internet), tut!jh (UUCP), jh@tut (Bitnet)
david@E.MS.UKY.EDU (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) (09/21/88)
Granted that email addresses are *currently* character strings.
I doubt that they should *always* be character strings.
As email use grows and becomes more prevalent then it will have
to mutate out of the simple stuff that we do nowadays. Even though
that 'simple' stuff is already fairly complicated and is quite
a number of steps *beyond* what it was a few years ago.
5 years ago domains were 'user.host@domain' ... or at least that
was one of the suggestions..
5 years from now email may be so widespread that the domain system
we have now will be teetering under the weight... An example
is the .com domain. The original design didn't have room for
tiny companies. Instead the 2nd level organizations were envisioned
to be something on the order of 100+ hosts. But there have been
a number of tiny one man companies get 2nd level .com domain
names. How long will the .com organizers be able to keep
that up?
I can just see an address like:
joe_blow@#3.456.Peyton_Place.Amherst.MA.10203.US
Which is fortunately a fairly tame address.
Mark, maybe you're right. Maybe X.400 won't catch on. I kind of
hope so since if X.400 *did* catch on MMDF would fade away and
I'd have to find something else to maintain :-). But in the
really long term I don't see 'character strings' being the
be all and end all of email addressing. Further it sounds to
me if the development is as a slightly critical point where
a format is about to be chosen, and which may easily affect
other developments...
--
<-- David Herron; The official MMDF guy of the 1988 Olympics <david@ms.uky.edu>
<-- ska: David le casse\*' {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET
<-- What does the phrase "Don't work too hard"
<-- have to do with the decline of the american 'work ethic'?piet@cwi.nl (Piet Beertema) (09/22/88)
I agree with Tommy that blanks are indee needed and used want we them
or not. So a way have to be found to live with them and not to try to
deny the problem like Piet does.
I don't want to deny the problem, I just want to
avoid it wherever possible. And, as said, I just
fail to see any good reason for including blanks
in a number of cases, like "gold 400". I think the
technicians *must* make it clear to the politicians
that they can *not* have everything they want ("we
choose this, they'll take care of it).
In our current gateway to a commercial mail network we succesfully map
blanks to _s and I don't see why such mapping coudn't be made an
explicit part of the recommendation.
Blank-to-underscore mapping is indeed very common;
lots of mailers include it. For that very reason
you can address me as "Piet_Beertema@cwi.nl".
Piet