% So this is our dilemna. The WG is perceived as being under
% great pressure to produce _something_ immediately, if not
% sooner. While strawman design notes for a directory base --
% including the outlines of referencing systems, a keyword
% overlay, and discussion of how it might all be made to work
% operationally and commercially-- are in progress and should be
% ready for IETF review quite soon, there are many details and
% no possibility for "immediately". Producing an in-DNS
% mechanism will take some of the pressure off, but risks
% delaying good-quality mechanisms for multilingual (and I do
% mean "multilingual") use of the Internet for a long time,
% perhaps forever. And, if those delays do occur, we can, I
% think, expect to see local approaches, probably incompatible
% ones, propagate to solve local problems for local users,
% resulting in exactly the sort of fragmentation most of us
% would like to avoid.
We can't avoid "local" optimizations. They are too easy to
do and meet the 80% rule. As was discussed in the bigz
working group (circa 91), the largest single driver to a
real directory system is encouraging the exaustion of easy
memnonc lables (e.g. all the good names are taken)
Once the memnonic value of the lable is neglegible, a directory
is a "natural" outgrowth. If we approach this with flat
spaces or with deep heirarchy are in some sense, cosmetic.
The end result should be the same, a lable that a human can't
possibly remember. In the addressing relem, IPv6 has already
delivered. One reason I was so enthusiastic about IDN was the
possibility that it would be a driver in reducing the memnonic
value of any given lable. (UTFx encoding vs ASCII) In hindsite
this may have been short sighted.
% So, with the understanding that the hardest questions have no
% technical resolution, we need to decide how to proceed and, in
% particular, whether to go ahead with an identifier, DNS, and
% script-based approach to solve a problem that involves words,
% terminology, and natural language.
Actually, the hardest questions have the simplest answers.
Accepting the answer might be hard. :)
To the extent that we can push a reduction on memnonoic value
in lables, the sooner we will have a compelling case for
directory service.
%
% john
--
--bill
