[ih] DNS History

Richard Bennett richard at bennett.com
Mon Mar 8 17:51:18 PST 2010


And now there's this Semantic Web thing and the Bob Kahn Digital Object 
Identifier systems that aim to expose structure in web sites so that the 
content can be more easily indexed, searched, and grabbed. In the end, 
it's all about granularity and aggregating local indexes.

On 3/8/2010 5:26 PM, Dave Crocker wrote:
>
>
>
>> 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/

-- 
Richard Bennett
Research Fellow
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
Washington, DC




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