RE: Attribute names not Internationalized ?

[Alan Lloyd <Alan.Lloyd@OpenDirectory.com.au>]

Why are you always right Andy?

Re ASN.1 (X.409 circa 1984) My thoughts are - there is little point in
looking into memories to see what the world was or is about. Its best to
look to the future to see what is about to happen. eg large scale X.500
(with LDAP access) deployments all over the place :-).

	re. attribute names have not been internationalized. 
	Does anybody know what's the reason ? 

I suppose attributes and OCs  have been standardised with OIDs - and the
reason for OID is one of devolved and distributed authority and
responsibility and for protocol reasons. IE. being passed between the
directory service and the client in the protocol is that client software
can interpret them and then display the values in the language concerned
- and where required - change the date formats, format the telephone
numbers, change 'S's to 'Z's, etc. for the attributes received.
.
Inversly its hard to standardise other language requirements by or with
those who naturally speak english and Australian derivatives.
It difficult to standardise what we dont understand.

regards alan






> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Andrew Probert 
> Sent:	Monday, October 11, 1999 8:26 AM
> To:	ietf-ldapext@netscape.com
> Subject:	RE: Attribute names not Internationalized ?
> 
> 1.  -- Is used in the ASN.1 to compile protocol handlers.  At the
> protocol
> level it is irrelevant to an X.500 server.  It is working with strings
> such
> as IA5String and Directory
> string which all allow this construct.
> 
> 2.  Old ASN standards were X.208 and X.209 (now superseeded by X.680 -
> X.690).
> 
> 3.  Agree, it was a bad idea to replace the OIDs (which are the data
> dictionary that 
>     tracks back to attribute registrars) with North American strings.
> Far
> better to
>     have OID -> String lookup tables in the client API itself.  
> 
>     As LDAP is progressively getting heavier anyway, the original
> LDAPV2
> concept of a light 
>     client, is now obselete.
> 
> 
> Andrew Probert
> Rotek Consulting
> a Division of Secure Network Solutions
> Tel +61 3 9690 8877
> Fax +61 3 9690 8171
> Mob +61 4 0941 3028
> http://www.rotek.com.au
> http://www.SecureNetCA.com.au
> http://www.SecureNetwork.com
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim Sermersheim [mailto:JIMSE@novell.com]
> Sent: Friday, 8 October 1999 4:20
> To: ietf-ldapext@netscape.com; sanjay.jain@software.com
> Subject: Re: Attribute names not Internationalized ?
> 
> 
> When I looked into this I decided it was becasue of an X.409
> restriction on
> the allowable characters in names. It said something about only ascii
> digits
> and letters, and a dash.  I also remember It went further to say the
> dash
> could not end a name, nor could there be two dashes together (-- is an
> ASN.1
> comment).  So LDAP servers which front-end X.500 directories could
> concievebly run into problems if the restriction on allowable
> characters was
> relaxed.  I'm not sure that's the real reason, and I don't have a copy
> of
> x.409 handy to verify these memories.
> 
> Jim
> 
> >>> sanjay jain <sanjay.jain@software.com> 10/7/99 11:42:54 AM >>>
> 
> attribute names have not been internationalized. 
> Does anybody know what's the reason ? 
> 
> thanks 
> sanjay