Re: looking for terminology recommendations concerning non-rooted FQDNs

On 2/22/13 11:01 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

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.

just keep in mind that while "." ought to be a label separator, the utc's bidi algorithm allows the directionality of a label to "leak" across the "period" character, where it is not a terminal character. hilarity ensues.