On May 30, 2025, at 12:42, Sarah Tarrant <starr...@staff.rfc-editor.org> wrote:
> Hi Ted,
>
> Thank you for the speedy reply -- I've updated per your request. Please be
> sure to refresh since I just updated these.
>
> We will await approvals from both authors.
Thank you Sarah.
Everything looks good, with just one final question. This is the last one, I
promise.
I previously wrote this text for the “Conventions and Terminology” section:
Strictly speaking, fully qualified domain names end with a dot.
In DNS zone files and other similar contexts, if the final dot is
omitted, then a name may be treated incorrectly as relative to some
other parent domain. This document follows the formal DNS
convention, ending fully qualified domain names with a dot.
When this document mentions domain names such as "local." and
"default.service.arpa.", the final dot is part of the domain name
and does not indicate the end of a sentence as it would in normal
prose.
I noticed that in the edit “dot” got changed to “period”, like this:
Strictly speaking, fully qualified domain names end with a period.
In DNS zone files and other similar contexts, if the final period is
omitted, then a name may be treated incorrectly as relative to some
other parent domain. This document follows the formal DNS
convention, ending fully qualified domain names with a period (".").
When this document mentions domain names such as "local." and
"default.service.arpa.", the final period is part of the domain name
and does not indicate the end of a sentence as it would in normal
prose.
I’ve thought about this four a couple of days, wondering if it was worth
mentioning, and I think it is.
A dot in a DNS name is not the same as a period in English prose. They may look
the same because they are generated by pressing the same key on the keyboard,
but that’s superficial. They are not semantically the same thing.
When speaking a domain name like “www.iana.org” out loud, no one says “period”
for the dots. Still, this is just informal usage. The definitive source for the
right terminology to use is the DNS RFCs.
This morning I decided I should check to see what terminology other DNS RFCs
use, since that is clearly the right precedent that this DNS RFC should follow.
After some reading, I do think that “dot” is the correct IETF DNS terminology.
RFC 1034 (DNS Concepts and Facilities)
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.
RFC 1035 (DNS Implementation and Specification)
<domain-name>s make up a large share of the data in the master
file. The labels in the domain name are expressed as character
strings and separated by dots. Quoting conventions allow
arbitrary characters to be stored in domain names. Domain names
that end in a dot are called absolute, and are taken as complete.
Domain names which do not end in a dot are called relative
RFC 9499 (DNS Terminology)
Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN): This is often just a clear way
of saying the same thing as "domain name of a node", as outlined
above. However, the term is ambiguous. Strictly speaking, a
fully qualified domain name would include every label, including
the zero-length label of the root; such a name would be written
"www.example.net." (note the terminating dot).
Nowhere in those RFCs do I see any mention of the DNS dot being called “period”
or “full stop”.
I think that RFC 9665 should be consistent with the existing DNS RFCs.
Here is some updated suggested text:
Strictly speaking, fully qualified domain names end with a dot (".").
In DNS zone files and other similar contexts, if the final dot is
omitted, then a name may be treated incorrectly as relative to some
other parent domain. This document follows the formal DNS
convention, ending fully qualified domain names with a dot.
When this document mentions domain names such as "local." and
"default.service.arpa.", the final dot is part of the domain name;
it is not a period indicating the end of the sentence.
Stuart Cheshire
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