looking for terminology recommendations concerning non-rooted FQDNs

Fri Feb 22 06:19:03 UTC 2013

On Fri, 2013-02-22 at 16:57 +1100, Mark Andrews wrote:
> RFC 952 as modified by RFC 1123 describe the legal syntax of a hostname.
> There is no trailing period.

No - but a trailing period is a (common?) way to indicate that the name
as given is complete, so in a lot of contexts a trailing period is at
least not illegal, and is often usefully meaningful.

The best example is inside zone files, where a trailing period indicates
that the origin should not be appended. It's used (by the resolver
library?) to indicate that any domain search suffixes should not be
attempted. In Firefox (and probably other browsers) it indicates that
the browser should not try common suffixes like ".com" if the hostname
provided does not resolve.

It's a convention common enough and useful enough that I can see why
people would want a handy term for it.

Regards, K.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://www.biplane.com.au/blog

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