Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!bionet!ig!agate!helios.ee.lbl.gov!lll-tis!cblpf.ATT.COM!mark From: mark@cblpf.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso.x400.gateway Subject: Re: Response to comments on DRAFT/2 Message-ID: <8809211418.AA17842@cblpf.ATT.COM> Date: 21 Sep 88 18:18:11 GMT Sender: root@tis.llnl.gov Distribution: inet Organization: The Internet Lines: 33 Approved: post-x400-gateway@tis.llnl.gov > A mapping between the DRAFT Recommendation we are discussing here and any > X.400 user interface is totally outside the scope of the DRAFT > recommendation's objectives. > > o To simplify local X.400 User Guides which should define the mapping > between the recommended notation and the local user interface. Sure seems to me that the most effective way to simplify local user guides would be to recommend a standard way to write addresses. This does not mean to imply that the user interfaces of every X.400 mailer in the world would be standardized. Merely that the way in which X.400 addresses are written as single character strings (as opposed to, say, as screen forms, or some other representation) ought to be consistent where possible. > Either > 1). a critical mass agree that RFC 987 syntax will be used at a sufficient > number of user interfaces to make it a de facto X.400 notation. I think this is the case, and I hear a lot of people on this mailing list who seem to agree. The objections I'm hearing are not from people pointing out other de facto standards (as far as I'm aware, there are none) but from people concerned about perceived technical shortcomings of 987. In particular, the major objection seems to be that it's not obvious how to deal with blanks and slashes. I went back and looked at 987 to double check. It seems that blank is encoded as _ and that / is encoded as #s# and to encode _ you use #u# . Since slashes and underscores will be rare, you won't see many instances of #s# in addresses. Since blanks are more common, you will see a fair number of underscores. There are, of course, escapes to cover other characters in the syntax, such as = , and an octal escape to cover anything unforeseen. Mark