Multilingual Strings

["Markus Kuhn (Inf4 - hiwi)" <[e-mail]>]

There is still one serious problem with X.520 that hasn't perhaps
been recognized by English-speaking experts. Directory Entries
will normally contain some attributes with descriptive text, e.g.
description, info, organizationalRole, ...

These attributes will always need two values in Germany: an English
text for the international X.500 user and a German text for the local
user (who will perhaps make 99% of all queries!). Unfortunately there is
no standardized way for the DUA to determine which attribute is in
which language. This makes it impossible for me to build a DUA that
shows me only the German attribute value and if there is none then the English,
French or Russian one. I don't even want too see the Chinese or Japanese
descriptions, because I don't understand these languages and I do not
even have the fonts to display them. Displaying all attribute values
surely isn't very user friendly.

The current practice (using only English) is all right in the current 
academic test environment, but in a few years we surely will have
horror entries where every description comes in at least 12 languages.
(Believe me, big multinational companies will do this!)

So what we need is a mechanism that allows the user to specify the 
language in which he/she just wrote the description. This might be
a new attribute type like MultilingualString = SEQUENCE { ISO10646String,
LanguageID } or an extension of the existing CaseIgnoreString or something
more briliant. What are your ideas?

This change would also be a good opportunity to address the multiple
line text problem: No word in X.520 specifies, whether CR/LFs are allowed
in a CaseIgnoreString or whether the DUA is responsible for the
linebreaks (ISODE DUAs don't feel responsible for this!).

These efforts should perhaps not only result in a new OSI-DS paper. I
think a modification of X.520 is necessary. Are any people from ISO or
CCITT reading this? How can one get in contact with them? Could you please
forward the problem to someone responsible for X.500(92)?

Markus

-- 
Markus Kuhn, Computer Science student -=-=- University of Erlangen, Germany
Internet: [e-mail]  |  X.500 entry available
-A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't-
-even know existed can render your own computer unusable. (Leslie Lamport)-