With respect to not hearing any reasons to avoid X.500, I would say
our experience has not been positive:
o Very complicated and opaque documentation.
o Not available online.
o Incomplete answers to simple questions, e.g. the role of RDNs, AVAs,
etc.
o No agreement on what OIDs exist, nor on how to introduce new ones.
o No mechanisms for specifying the legal set of values for an OID.
o Etc.
X.500, in my view, is trying to be both a general purpose data
representation language and a domain specific database. It's not
doing very well at either.
If there really is a lot of X.500 usage, and it really does serve some
community, then fine. Yes, I keep hearing how it's being used in
Europe, in major companies, at the University of Texas, etc. Are
these meaningful? I certainly can't tell. Perhaps these are really
significang usages that are now part of the infrastructure, or perhaps
they're just splinter experiments which are side roads off the
information highway.
I can't claim to have traveled the entire system, but I haven't
encountered X.500 yet. Compared, say, to Mosaic, how important is
X.500?
Steve