Donald,
DNs are hopeless. Anyone reading the tens of thousands of lines of
pedantic disputation re DN diddle-shit that have gone by on this
mailing list would be forced to that conclusion but it is also
derivable from principles. Yes, you can construct an unambiguous name
from naturally occuring names such as country, organization, person
name, street address, etc., etc., etc. but to guarantee uniqueness you
end up with something so long and complex it is useless for human
beings and has to include so much junk that part of the DN will change
so often that, for many applications, it just does not have the
stability required for a useful "name".
As the indicted and convicted pedantic and excessively verbose author of
probably well over half of those ten thousand lines of diddle-shit, I agree
with you.
A simple Internet e-mail address could be a perfectly fine DN, and could be
to look up all of the rest of the junk, even if someone wants to send a FAX or
a Telex, or an X.121 message to you. Some of this information, and
probably a lot more besides, would be useful to stick into a certificate
for the purose of validating digitally signed and archived messages for
nonrepudiation, but insisting on too close a correspondence between the
information in the certificate and the X.400 address is probably a mistake.
Part of the problem seems to be that people think you should have to
enter all of this information manually, instead of using a reasonable search
criteria
to find what you are looking for.
I keep all of the information that I ever need to know about all of my
correspondents in my Sharp Wizard, and seldom do I even use the wildcard
capability that it provides. I type in the first few charaters of last name,
and I
hit the right one on the first or second try. Out pops e-mail addresses, FAX
numbers, cellular and beeper numbers, home and office addresses and phone
numbers, and even birthdays.
The problem is not with the directories (if there were any that were widely
available), but with the exceedingly poor interfaces to such functions that
are included in most e-mail packages. And here I am talking vanilla Windows and
Macintosh applications and network based systems like cc:mail,
not some fancy-dancy Unix program that only runs on a $15,000 Sun
workstation.
Hopefully this will begin to change within the next year, as commercial-quality
implementations of PEM begin to appear from people like Lotus. But I am
not writing a check on that account just yet.
Bob