OSI-DS 12: Titles and T.61 characters

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

From osi-ds-12-05.txt:

   3.5  Naming human users

[...]
                           It is proposed that pilots should ignore the
   standard's recommendations on storing personal titles, and letters
   indicating academic and professional qualifications within the
   commonName attribute, as this overloads the commonName attribute.  A
   personalTitle attribute has already been specified in the COSINE and
   Internet Schema, and another attribute could be specified for
   information about qualifications.

There might be some problems with this approach in Germany. Here the title
Dr. (Doktor) is officially a part of the name, i.e. it is written on
passports, documents, ... Perhaps the situation is different in English
speaking countries. In addition in an academic environment in Germany,
you will nearly never see a professor's name without "Prof. Dr.".
So I suggest that some limited titels (e.g. Dr. and Prof. Dr. in Germany)
should be allowed in commonName RDNs, where regional regulations permit
this in the directory. Of course I agree completely if you propose
that full titles like "Prof. Dr.-ing. Dr. habil Dr. h.c. mult John
I. Likemyname-Donti" should NOT be the RDN. :-)

I think this should be managed a little bit more liberal in the final
version of OSI-DS 12, e.g. by referencing to national regulations.
The German pilot DSA Managers are planning to set up guidelines for
these problems in a few months, and it would be nice if this would be
possible without conflicts with OSI-DS 12.

Another problem with RDNs in Germany: Should T.61 characters be allowed
in RDNs? Many German names need them, but also many terminals don't
support them. As the world is still waiting for X.500(92) supporting
ISO 10646 characters, I'd prefer if T.61 strings were not allowed in
RDNs in the pilot, because this string type might soon become obsolete.

stud. inf. Markus
(DS-Manager h.c. mult. Uni-Erlangen ;-)

-- 
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)-