Re: Strong caveat on user-friendly directory

[David Collier-Brown <davecb@Canada.Sun.COM>]

Thomas M. McGhan, tmcghan@gill-simpson.com wrote:
> Is this subtantially different from the existing situation for our
> friend, the president of American Standard, who looks up his company
> in the Yellow Pages, the AT&T Toll-Free Directory, the Chamber of
> Commerce index, etc.? 

  Yes, they are **very obviously** different: not at the level
of function (there's no difference at that level), but at the level of
presentation.
  The yellow pages presents selections of differently-named 
companies in different business categories[1], by category.
You'd have to do a grep on a paper book to get the kind of presentation
that I illustrated, which is quite impractical.

  Now if you mentioned the white pages, then that might be different...
You look in the white pages for a name, alphabetically, to look up
an ip number... OOPS! I mean telephone number (:-))

  In my view, the dns is the first, deliberately limited form of the
white pages, and the fact that it doesn't do searches (because it's a 
lookup service, not a directory) prevents us from having the
names of easily-confusable companies presented to us.
  In the yellow pages area, (and the blue pages, see below), the
businesses who elect to list themselves there do so in order that
customers will look there and find them, and their compeditors,
in alphabetical order within their respective categories.
   This also scales to non-business addresses: in Canada we have
blue pages, which list governement departments by category (ministry).
  And presumably someone has pink pqages...

--dave 
[1: where did they get those categories? Any AT&T folks on
    this list???]
--
David Collier-Brown,  | Always do right. This will gratify some people
185 Ellerslie Ave.,   | astonish the rest.        -- Mark Twain
Willowdale, Ontario   | davecb@hobbes.ss.org, canada.sun.com
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