Subject: Sub-Names

From: Adam Theo <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 15:19:02 -0400

Hello, Adam Theo here

thank you, ms. daigle, for explaining the state/evolution of the cnrp.
my searching through the list archives didn't bring up anything relevant
to this that i could find, so i hope i'm not walking on used up ground
on this next one.

i've been thinking of this so called 'common name' technology for a few
months, without knowledge of this list, only knowing a little about AOL's,
Netscape's, and RealNames' keywords systems. but i came up with a few
ideas.

one of which was that domain names are allowed sub-domain names for resources
that lie under the same domain, but are important enough to warrant a
certain amount of recognition. for example, 'search.portal.cxm', 'autobio.personal.cxm',
etc.

while common names are traditionally composed of single phrases that
direct the user to a single resource, allowing something along the lines
of sub-domains for common names would be tremendously useful if implimented
properly. an owner of a common name could enable users to go directly
to the search site of his website without having to buy a whole new common
name for the search site.

the most important function of this, however, could be with email addresses.
it would be wonderful to enable users to use the common name system to
send and recieve email. but allotting a whole common name to each email
address would quickly use up the namespace. allowing for sub-names would
make it work much like domain names do.

what would be done to create these sub-CNs would be to allow each service
the ability to impliment these sub-CNs. it doesn't have to if it doesn't
want to. next, it should then be allowed to decide upon a character or
set of characters that would be reserved only for the purpose of dividing
the main-CN from the sub-CN. with english-based services, the '@' sign
would do very well since it is not often used in common names, and is
already familiar to the general internet public.

such a sub-CN, using the examples from above, could look like this on
Yahoo!'s CN service:

'Search @ Portal', or 'Autobio @ Personal'.

on Lycos, it could be:

'Search >> Portal', or 'Autobio >> Personal'.

and AOL could decide it doesn't want to use sub-CNs, so it would just
have to be:

'Portal Search', or 'Personal Autobio' or something along those lines.

thoughts?

--
Adam Theo
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---

From: Michael Mealling <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 16:15:43 -0400

On Tue, Jul 18, 2000 at 03:19:02PM -0400, Adam Theo wrote:
> certain amount of recognition. for example, 'search.portal.cxm',
> 'autobio.personal.cxm', etc.
>
> <snip>
>
> thoughts?

Hi,
  Since the CN can be any string with any puncuation in it you can
create any pseudo hierarchy you want. I.e. if you want something like
Ford Probe, Ford Mustang, Ford Aerostar, Ford Focus, etc you just
insert the names in your datbase that way. if you want some kind of
syntactic sugar you simply put that sugar in there as well.
  I.e lets say you wanted to re-create domain-names as common-names.
Since its your database you could insert the names according to
whatever syntax you wanted. E.g. something.yahoo, foo.google, bar.msn.
Personally this doesn't appeal to me but I'm not going to tell
you that you can't do this. IMHO, doing something more natural
like Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Maps, Yahoo People  Search, etc makes
much more sense to the people in the world (especially since that's
how Yahoo brands itself).

-MM

--
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Michael Mealling        |      Vote Libertarian!       | www.rwhois.net/michael
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