UFN take 2

[Steve Hardcastle-Kille <[e-mail]>]

You may have been wondering what happened to UFN when all of the other
RFCs were published.    It is a long story, involving much email and
discussion.   The consequences of this is two new documents, which are
being submitted as Internet Drafts.   I expect both to be discussed by
RARE WG3 in Brussels and OSI-DS in San Diego, and assuming that the WG
is supportive of the new direction, they will be submitted as RFCs.  

The two documents are:

1) A String Representation of Distinguished Names.    This contains
a format based on UFN, which gives a notation for distinguished names.
It is intended that this will be submitted as proposed standard.

2) Using the OSI Directory to achieve  User Friendly Naming.  This is
the mechanism for dealing with purported names and matching (most of
the old UFN document).  It uses the syntax defined in 1).  It is
proposed that this is submitted as experimental.

This split is made to reflect two distinct functions of the document,
and the level of agreement on each function.

There are some issues I would like to draw your attention to, for
discussion at the two meetings.   On the distinguished name format:

1) CRLF is currently used as an alternate separator to ",".   It has
been suggested that it would be better to mandate "," as the
separator, and then use CRLF for folding (as in RFC 822).   Comments
are solicited - most UFN implementations I have seen are one liners.

2) It has been suggested that we should define delimiters for
distinguished names.  Currently there are no delimiters, and the
syntax is not self delimiting.  Delimiters might be useful.


The UFN proposal is viewed as experimental.   Questions which need to
be resolved, if this is to be progressed:

1) Is it desirable to have a notation which is potentially ambiguous?
2) Is this approach really useful?
3) Are there modifications to the algorithm which should be
investigated?
4) What is the impact on overall directory performance



Steve





-----

OSI-DS 23
osi-ds-23-00.ps
osi-ds-23-00.txt
        A String Representation of Distinguished Names
	S.E. Hardcastle-Kille
        January 1992
	Abstract:
The OSI Directory uses distinguished names as the primary keys to
entries in the directory.  Distinguished Names are encoded in ASN.1.
When a distinguished name is communicated between to users not using a
directory protocol (e.g., in a mail message), there is a need to have
a user-oriented string representation of a directory name.


OSI-DS 24
osi-ds-24-00.ps
osi-ds-24-00.txt
        Using the OSI Directory to achieve  User Friendly Naming
	S.E. Hardcastle-Kille
        January 1992
	Abstract:
The OSI Directory has user friendly naming as a goal.  A simple minded
usage of the directory does not achieve this.  Two aspects not
achieved are:

 o  A user oriented notation
 o  Guessability

This proposal sets out some conventions for representing names in a
friendly manner, and shows how this can be used to achieve really
friendly naming.  This then leads to a specification of a standard
format for representing names, and to procedures to resolve them.
This leads to a specification which allows directory names to be
communicated between humans.  The format in this specification is
identical to that defined in [HK92], and it is intended that these
specifications are compatible.


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