[ih] DNS History

[Dave Crocker]

> Could you say the same thing about X.500?
>
>> Nope -- early attempt to do the web.
>>
>>> Wasn't all that Archie and Veronica stuff an attempt to provide the
>>> Internet with a directory service?


This exchange is confusing things a bit.

The Web publishes documents and has evolved into something that is probably best 
viewed as allowing interaction with documents.  (That might be a Procrustean 
view, given the lofty views of web 2.0, etc., but I'm trying to stay with basics.)

Google, et all, scan the web and index it.  A search engine is not 'the web', 
although it is a tool of the web.  The web is either the documents or the full 
set of things that touch the documents.  But a search engine is not 'the' web.

Anonymous FTP published documents.  Lousy usability characteristics. Gopher 
published documents. Reasonable usability, but limited document style. They were 
the early sequence that led to the actual Web.

Archie indexed ftp.  Veronica indexed gopher. Early search engines. These are 
services that are layered on top of the publication service and the publication 
service is passive, in that there was no organized registration of the 
documents, particularly, with respect to the indexing (more recent active web 
page support of search engines not withstanding.)

X.500 was a user name registration scheme, originally designed to lookup users, 
especially for email. It started with the premise that, done in scale, a human 
name is not unique so that other attributes would be needed to distinguish the 
target user.  Since if flowed from X.400, the concept of a simple, global, 
unique email address was already a lost cause.  (Your global address was 
relative to your provider, which led to some interesting business cards, for 
folks who had multiple providers.)

In its earliest discussions, the function description was strikingly similar to 
what we built for MCI Mail, so that

    crocker, brandenburg, california

might produce my address.  (My first participation in the X.500 discussions was 
shortly after we had MCI Mail running, so I was able to confirm the utility of 
this basic model, though not the later technical design for achieving it in 
scale.  MCI Mail was a closed system.)

But note that the data base that X.500 used was for actively registered email 
users, not passively available (rather than listed) documents.  This was meant 
to be more like a White Pages than a more general searching service, even as 
constrained as a Yellow Pages.  (But yes, goals expanded.)

Besides having a search function, X.500 differed from the goals of the DNS by 
being finer-grained, targeting personal addresses, rather than host addresses.

The differences between document publishing, personnel registration, name lookup 
and name (or, more generally, attribute) searching each warrant distinction from 
the other.

d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net