On 2013-02-22, at 14:39, Jay Ashworth <jra@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