looking for terminology recommendations concerning non-rooted FQDNs

Jay Ashworth jra at baylink.com
Fri Feb 22 18:20:57 UTC 2013


----- Original Message -----
> From: "Joe Abley" <jabley at hopcount.ca>

> Actually, I think the problem is the confusion between a label string
> terminated in a dot (to indicate that no search domain should be
> appended) and a label string not so-terminated (which might mean that
> a search domain is attempted, depending on local configuration).

In fact, Joe, I think it's distinguishing your second case from "a label
string which is intended to reference a rooted FQDN, but the user did not
specify the trailing dot -- and yet still does not want a search path 
applied"...

which is 99.9999% of the time outside of large corporate and college
campuses, and only 99.9% of the time, otherwise.  :-)

> The terminology "root zone" or "root domain" to explain the trailing
> dot is misleading and unhelpful, I find.

No, what's *really* unhelpful and misleading is the people who say that
it is the *dot* which specifies the name of the root, rather than the
null labelstring which *follows* that dot (which is what it actually
is, and I'll save everyone's stomach linings by not saying the words
"alternate root" here. :-)

Cheers,
-- jr 'new intercalations on every message for authentication' a
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com         2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA               #natog                      +1 727 647 1274




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