Reply to Ommitted components in the 1327 mapping

[Michael Storz <[e-mail]>]

> 4) Define a new NULL component.   The value of the component is the
> type that has been ommitted. This would lead to lookup of an address
> of the form:
>    C=US; A=XXX; NullComponent=PRMD; O=YYY

Sorry, I do not understand how this approach should work for both directions
of the mapping. Take the following mapping

O$@.PRMD$@.ADMD$cdnnet.C$ca#cdnnet.ca#
cdnnet.ca#O$@.PRMD$@.ADMD$cdnnet.C$ca#

The first mapping would lead to

   c=ca@aDMDName=cdnnet@NullComponent=PRMD@NullComponent=O

with mhsAssociatedDomain=cdnnet.ca

But what about the second mapping?

   domainComponent=ca@domainComponent=cdnnet

with associatedORAddress= /c=ca/admd=cdnnet/???/???

As far as I know O/R address does not include the attribute NullComponent :-)

This means you have to use different solutions for the two mappings and I do not
like such a solution. The solution should be symmetrical. The only possible
solution then is 2) using a placeholder for the null value. I agree using a
string as placeholder which could be a valid value is not a very elegant
solution, but at least it is symmetrical.

Taking Haralds new information into account, that CCITT ruled empty
organizations as illegal, then we can at least choose a value which is not
valid for PRMD, because PRMD does not allow T.61 (for example a value with '$').
This could be used for empty organizations too. This would help all the
people which unfortunately have an empty organization like all the german
universities. If an organization would exist where the value indeed is the
string we choose, then all the organizations with an empty value would have a
problem but this does not matter because it is not allowed to have such a value
and therefore they should change their naming :-) But in the meantime we could
register the mappings in a routing tree untill such a transition to non-empty
values has ended.

Regards,

Michael