Stef@NRTC.NORTHROP.COM (Einar Stefferud) (09/12/88)
ADMINISTRIVIA: For our IFIP-GTWY correspondents who may want to send mail into the rare-wg1 mailing list in connection with this discussion, I believe that "rare-wg1%vax.runit.unit.uninett@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk" will work correctly from Internet Sites. @nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk is authorizd to pass mail to the rare-wg1 list address in the unregistered "uninett" domain. SUBSTANCE: I do not want to indicate in any that I do not appreciate the need or the difficulty that lurks in attempts to solve the ORAddress Shorthand Problem. But, I am somewhat concernd that the document is written so it will not be understood to be a RARE standard that only applies to the RARE community. People outside the RARE community may be quite confused by it, if they ever see it. I expect that many non-RARE people will certainly see ORAddresses written in RARE Notation. I am pleased to note that the document does not suggest that RFC987 be rewritten to comply with the chosen RARE WG1 <keywords>, but I wonder how things work when your RARE WG1 keywords are encountered in an RFC987 gateway, on mail from an Internet Site, on its way to an X.400 site. This situation is certain to arise. HUMOUR: I find it highly amusing to see how much user friendliness is generated by our User Friendly ORAddresses. Of course, in order to be able to "more or less deduce addresses from ordinary business card information" we must accept some degree of ambiguity due to the non-standards-abiding nature of the worldwide business card printing industry. Unfortunately, ambiguity in addresses is not friendly, even on good old fashioned Postal Mail. Quite frankly, I see this whole thing as a monstrous case of technology gone awry in the interests of being friendly, without first finding out what "friendly" really means. What started out as an attempt to emulate a warm and wiggly puppy has now grown up to be a real dog. Dare we chuckle? I hope so! Cheers...\Stef
piet@cwi.nl (Piet Beertema) (09/13/88)
Note:
4. No distinction is made between upper and lower case although keywords
in upper case and their values in lower case gives a clearer display.
Hard to maintain: having to present e.g. a name in lower-case-only,
as this suggests isn't acceptable. Rather change this note into:
4. No distinction is made between upper and lower case; it is
suggested though that keywords be given in upper case.
5. Space characters inside <value> are significant otherwise they are
used only for readability.
Well, yes, BUT: quite often it's impossible to tell whether a
white space on a business card is inter-character space or a
"real" space. But the only solution to that problem would be
to make spaces inside a value non-significant....
Why use the recommended notation?
---------------------------------
Yes, why??? That's the crucial question. I completely fail to
see the use of this all if it would set apart the academic
community as a "special entity" from the rest of the world,
where this community *does* and *has to* communicate with
the rest of the world and where this communication eventually
is to be based entirely on a standard accepted *worldwide*.
Sure, it's only a *recommended* rather than a *standard*
notation, but one with a limited scope, unknown outside the
academic community, perhaps causing confusion outside it
and certainly not accepted outside it; and it even remains
to be seen whether it will be accepted in the *whole* academic
(and research!) community. I doubt it.
Therefore, by adhering to this recommendation, putting your
X.400 address on your business card might well require the
*entire* "Definition of the Notation" to be put on (and to
fill!) the back of that business card.
And then, let's hope that this particular notation, if people
really use addresses represented that way [on business cards],
inside and outside the academic community, will be understood
by the X.400 mailers those people use. That too I doubt.
Piet