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Re: ;binary and *

Kurt D. Zeilenga wrote: 
At 04:33 AM 2002-03-04, Michael Ströder wrote:

David Chadwick wrote:

OR not return the attribute.

Absolutely not. The user has asked for ALL attributes. Unless access
controls prevent it, all should be returned, even if the user cant
handle them.
For example, pictures should be returned, even though today
some well known windows clients cant display them (whilst others can).

I concur.


This is no different to sending others back using ;binary encoding. The
server does not know what the client supports, so should assume it can
support everything since it has not limited what it wants.

Yes. 

Then clients MUST treat any attribute description which contains
an unrecognized option as unrecognized.


Do you think that's a big difference to what LDAP clients are
already doing today?

 Clients cannot simply
treat attributes with unrecognized options as an (indirect)
subtype of the attribute description with the same attribute
type and no options.


So what?

Frankly I wouldn't expect most LDAP applications to treat e.g. cn;lang-de-DE automagically as a sub-type of cn if the application wasn't explicitly designed to handle language sub-types. I also can't imagine an exact behaviour a LDAP application should have. I'd consider it rather as opening a can of worms.

It is a really bad idea for servers to assume clients support
anything which is not REQUIRED.

IMHO it's also a bad idea for servers to assume which attributes a client cannot handle based on what the client requested or did not request when using *.

I think I'd vote for assuming that client applications would be at least smart enough to move unhandled attribute types to /dev/null.

Ciao, Michael.