looking for terminology recommendations concerning non-rooted FQDNs

Fri Feb 22 05:57:42 UTC 2013

In message <20130221225540.GA99258 at numachi.com>, Brian Reichert writes:
> I'm trying to nail down some terminology for doc purposes.
> 
> The issue: most resources on the net freely describe a fully-qualified
> domian name ('FQDN') as to exclude the root domain; i.e, they exclude
> the trailing dot as mandated by some RFCs such as RFC 1535:

RFC 1535 is Informational.  It has no status to mandate anything.

>   http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1535.txt
> 
>     An absolute "rooted" FQDN is of the format {name}{.} A non
>     "rooted" domain name is of the format {name}
> 
> I'm trying to come up with some human-facing terminology that names
> these two forms:
> 
> 	"a.b.c."
> 	"a.b.c"
> 
> Many resources on the net use the term 'rooted domain name' for the
> former, but they're collectively ambigious about what the other
> form should be called.
> 
> Does anyone here have any solid advice, or can point me to a resource
> that would call out useful conventions?
> 
> This was all fueled by Microsoft's client code apparently stripping
> the root domain from PTR record results; I'm separately trying to
> track down why that's occuring...

RFC 952 as modified by RFC 1123 describe the legal syntax of a hostname.
There is no trailing period.

> -- 
> Brian Reichert				<reichert at numachi.com>
> BSD admin/developer at large	
> 
-- 
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: marka at isc.org