looking for terminology recommendations concerning non-rooted FQDNs

Fri Feb 22 18:51:36 UTC 2013

On 2013-02-22, at 14:39, Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:

>>> 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"...
>> 
>> That's the same as my second case.
>> 
>> "rooted FQDN" is also not well-defined outside this thread. I don't
>> think just adopting the terminology unilaterally is going to make it
>> so.
> 
> It isn't?

Nope.

> I knew what he meant immediately, without having to read the rest of
> the sentence: an ascii represenation of a fully qualified hostname
> with a period at the end.

I could have guessed the same thing, but the phrase is not in common use, and hence I think "not well-defined" is the right description.

> but since the dot is a separator (I believe by definition), if it exists
> at the end, it has to be separating *something*.

I had a quick look, and RFC 1035 agrees with you, so I guess I have to eat my words :-)

  When a user needs to type a domain name, the length of each label is
  omitted and the labels are separated by dots (".").  Since a complete
  domain name ends with the root label, this leads to a printed form which
  ends in a dot.  We use this property to distinguish between:

     - a character string which represents a complete domain name
       (often called "absolute").  For example, "poneria.ISI.EDU."

     - a character string that represents the starting labels of a
       domain name which is incomplete, and should be completed by
       local software using knowledge of the local domain (often
       called "relative").  For example, "poneria" used in the
       ISI.EDU domain.

  Relative names are either taken relative to a well known origin, or to a
  list of domains used as a search list.  Relative names appear mostly at
  the user interface, where their interpretation varies from
  implementation to implementation, and in master files, where they are
  relative to a single origin domain name.  The most common interpretation
  uses the root "." as either the single origin or as one of the members
  of the search list, so a multi-label relative name is often one where
  the trailing dot has been omitted to save typing.

So I guess we have a winner, according to the spec: "absolute domain name". I don't believe that's in common usage either, but at least it is referenced in the specification.

Joe