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LDAP is just "lightweight" protocol for accessing an X.500 directory service.

The semantics are the same for the accessed store, IIRC. The protocol definition explicitly talks about being used to access X.500 data stores as complementary interface to DAP (which requires lower layers of OSI stack vs LDAP's raw stream of bytes)

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Yes, that is why it was invented, as I alluded to. LDAP was an alternative to DAP. DAP is part of the X.500 standard, LDAP is not. LDAP when it was first invented was built to access an X.500 directory. That is no longer a base requirement and most directories in the wild are not built on X.500. Standards mean things, just because LDAP was originally built to access X.500 doesn't mean it's part of X.500, and X.500 is a very detailed and specific standard which most directory services no longer follow.

To reiterate in a slightly different form: Ldap is an inheritor of, and successor to, DAP/X.500, but not backwards compatible and only superficially resembling it at this point.

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