Subject: Re: On attribute-based queries

From: Stuart Cheshire <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Aug 2002 20:44:49 -0700

>Each desktop sharing service announces its availability using SLP,
>together with the user's full name and user id. This allows an
>administrator to search for the user by name or id. Sometimes the
>administrator may only know the first or last name, so he can
>query for all Johns or all Millers. Or when the admin does not
>know how to spell the name he can enter a part of the name.

Err. Did I miss something here? The SLP protocol now requires every 
device to implement the Soundex name matching algorithm to find variant 
spellings of names?

If SLP *does* require Soundex name matching, then that's pretty good 
evidence for my claim that SLP is too much burden to impose on every 
device.

If SLP does *not* require Soundex name matching, then that's pretty good 
evidence for my claim that SLP's query language is not sufficiently 
general to meet the needs of every application.

Either way, the conclusion is the same -- one size does not fit all. 
Let's strip the discovery protocol to the lowest practical common 
denominator, and let each application implement the attribute matching 
technique appropriate to that application.

Stuart Cheshire <[email-masked]>
 * Wizard Without Portfolio, Apple Computer
 * Chairman, IETF ZEROCONF
 * www.stuartcheshire.org

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From: Tim Jansen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Aug 2002 16:04:28 +0200

> device to implement the Soundex name matching algorithm to find variant

No, but it allows wildcards. So if I dont know how to spell your name I could 
search for "Stuar*" or "Ches*". 
It would be easy to use Soundex with SLP though: just store the Soundex code 
in the attribute.

> technique appropriate to that application.

No one said that SLP's attribute queries are sufficient for all applications. 
But they should be sufficient for most, and help you to get a much better 
performance in large networks.

bye...