----- Original Message -----
From: "Joe Abley" <jabley@hopcount.ca>
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? 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.
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,
The dot doesn't specify the name of the root. That's why it's confusing.
Oh: we're in violent agreement. :-)
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. :-)
There is no null label string following the dot in a fully-qualified domain name, in this context. You're confusing the presentation of domain names with wire-format encoding of domain names.
Well, alas, I think you have to unpack that last sentence at least one more layer for me to be sure what I'm agreeing or disagreeing with... but since the dot is a separator (I believe by definition), if it exists at the end, it has to be separating *something*. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@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