# Re: going too far

Walt Lazear (lazear@gateway.mitre.org)
Fri, 2 Dec 94 11:38:16 EST

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    Date: Fri, 2 Dec 94 11:38:16 EST

    From: lazear@gateway.mitre.org (Walt Lazear)

    Message-Id: <9412021638.AA09201@gateway.mitre.org>

    To: uri@bunyip.com

    Subject: Re: going too far

The discussion started by Karen Sollins reminds me of the
trench that the X.400 folks dug themselves into when they
first invented X.400 addresses in 1984. That year's version
had an email address (the so-called "Originator/Recipient Address")
that was really to be used for routing among email forwarders.
It was ugly, it was topology related, and it was the analog of
a URL.

They immediately started aiming at using X.500 Directory Services
to retrieve this ugly O/R address, but they had to invent a nicer
name for people, so they came up with the "Distinguished Name"
that had an attribute called O/R Address. Thus, you were supposed
to use this long-lived and friendlier DN to obtain the ugly and
changeable ORA. The DN sounds like a URN to me.

Thus we have history repeating itself, where we are trying to
recover from the initial usage of an object (URL) that was fine
when the system was small, but when things got serious, it broke
quickly and uglily :-) X.400 had to try to live through the same
period of using-but-hating the "address" as a "name" that the NIDR
community is in the middle of now with URLs and URNs. The good
news is that you eventually do it right, but the growing pains
are not fun.

Walt

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