From: John Lowry <jlowry(_at_)dave(_dot_)bbn(_dot_)com>
Date: Fri, 4 Feb 94 16:31:42 EST
I contend that in the long run, DNs will average shorter and
more mnemonic than domain names.
You'll have to explain to me sometime how a DN like
/C=US/OU=Massachusetts Institute of Technology/OU=Distributed Computing
and Network Services/CN=Theodore Ts'o
will ever become shorter than email names like "tytso(_at_)mit(_dot_)edu".
Do you really expect Internet email names to become 100 characters or
more? I find this very hard to believe!!!
As I've said before, this isn't necessarily saying that DN's are
automatically bad. It just means that we have to pay very serious
attention to user interface issues. Particularily, what *do* two
X.[45]00 users do when they want to exchange email addresses, or DN's
for X.509 certificates? What do they type into their systems. And what
do we do *before* X.500 directory servers become commonplace?
Otherwise, competing technologies like PGP are much simpler to use. (I
am deliberately not commenting on the relative technical strengths of
the two systems; just their usability.) We need to do something to make
PEM easy to use, or people won't use it.
- Ted