looking for terminology recommendations concerning non-rooted FQDNs

Fri Feb 22 18:01:49 UTC 2013

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 04:57:42PM +1100, Mark Andrews wrote:
> 
> RFC 952 as modified by RFC 1123 describe the legal syntax of a hostname.
> There is no trailing period.

Mark is of course correct about this, but it doesn't fully help.

The basic problem is (as always) the confusion about the difference
between a hostname and a fully-qualified domain name, which so happens
to be also a hostname.

Whether we like it or not, this ambiguity is no longer something that
can be resolved.  What you have to do is know whether you are dealing
with a hostname (no final dot, because the hostname syntax doesn't use
it), a domain name relative to the root (no final dot, because
implicitly you're not using the search path; it is nearly impossible
to tell the difference between this and a host name), a domain name
relative to something else, relying on your search path (bad, evil,
and wrong, just stop it or you get what you deserve), or an actually
fully-qualified domain name (final dot).  The second of these is about
to get harder to distinguish from the third, because of the new gTLD
programme at ICANN.

I wish there were a neat answer to the problem.  There isn't.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
Dyn, Inc.
asullivan at dyn.com
v: +1 603 663 0448