Re: The 'any' attribute type

[Mark Wahl <M.Wahl@INNOSOFT.COM>]

Yes, for four reasons.

First, 

1.1 is known not to be attribute because of who it owns it and because it is 
already assigned to be something that is not an attribute.  That does not mean
you could assign new semantics to 1.2 or 1.1.1, because ISO or ITU-T 
control those OIDs.

Second, 

That is not the way attribute subtyping is defined for LDAPv3 and X.500.  
Attributes with options act as subtypes of the attribute without the option,
and an attribute can be defined as a subtype of another.  This forms a hierarchy
of attribute subtyping. 

Third,

Language tags have an internal structure.  While you might not see both lang-ja
and lang-ja-JP for differentiating between different forms of Japanese, in 
other countries, such as Norway, you need differentiators for different
cultural subsets of a single 'language'.

Fourth,

What does a client do with foo;lang-ja when it does not know foo?  I don't 
see the value of an option that allows a client to be sent some subset of the
attributes that is neither what it asked for nor a subtype of that.  We already
have a way of asking for all information.  This control is basically the same
as asking for all attributes whose attribute types have a 'k' in them: the 
client might get some information that it expected.  This sort of processing 
would seem to be best left up to the client.

Mark Wahl, Directory Product Architect
Innosoft International, Inc.