looking for terminology recommendations concerning non-rooted FQDNs

Fri Feb 22 19:01:05 UTC 2013

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 01:39:21PM -0500, Jay Ashworth wrote:
> but since the dot is a separator (I believe by definition), if it exists
> at the end, it has to be separating *something*.
> 

Without getting into metaphysics, we can think of the dot in the
presentation format as representing the separators in the wire
format.  In the wire format, of course, these separators are octets
that indicate the size of the next label.  And since the final label
is null, the separator indicates a zero length in the wire format.
Therefore, in the presentation format, the final separator is
indicative of the (null) root label after.

But if we want to skirt metaphysics, the problem here is the status of
the presentation vs. wire format.  If these are two perfectly co-equal
forms of representation, then we have a funny problem, since in the
global DNS the wire format is _never_ a relative lookup (the search
path gets appended before lookup).  If on the other hand the
presentation format is merely one for human consumption, and the wire
format is canonical, then there's just a representational problem.

This of course doesn't actually help with the original question, which
is how to refer to all these things unambiguously.  I have no idea how
to solve that: the different terms have an established use, and fixing
ambiguities in established use is a problem far beyond the bounds of
networking.  

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
Dyn, Inc.
asullivan at dyn.com
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