Of course. A curious property of authentic Australian boomerangs is that
they don't return if named by a DN, as no self-respecting boomerang would
want to return to someone who called their boomerang by such a name.
E-mail addresses are ok though. :-)
Funny you mention that. It remains me of a joke I put up for at talk to the
Joint European Networks Conference, in Blois in 1992 (or was it 1991? I may
be getting old).
Lets take a real life dog. Say, your dog. Usual name is "mirsa". You call
him: "mirsa, come here" and the dog runs to you, waving its tail. Now, if
you try "mirsa(_at_)inria(_dot_)fr, come here", there are some chances that the
dog
will come, probably without running not waving its tail. But if you try
"Class=dog, Common-Name=mirsa, Org-Unit=sophia, Org=INRIA,
City=Rocquencourt, Region=78, Country=France, come here" there are more
than a few chances that the dog will continue walking in another direction.
This to say that I do not believe that DNs are the ultimate masterpiece of
naming technology. In fact, their complexity reflects a fundamental
illusion. One can try to build up a name space which is at the same time
hierarchical, unique, legally significant, immanent and user friendly. I
believe that one will generally fail. I do not want to discourage whoever
is trying to achieve that result. But I do not accept the idea that this
would be the one and only way to provide security in the Internet. We
should agree on a scheme which accomodates many name forms, X.500 DNs being
only one of them.
Christian Huitema