On Fri, 2013-02-22 at 16:57 +1100, Mark Andrews wrote: > RFC 952 as modified by RFC 1123 describe the legal syntax of a hostname. > There is no trailing period.
No - but a trailing period is a (common?) way to indicate that the name as given is complete, so in a lot of contexts a trailing period is at least not illegal, and is often usefully meaningful. The best example is inside zone files, where a trailing period indicates that the origin should not be appended. It's used (by the resolver library?) to indicate that any domain search suffixes should not be attempted. In Firefox (and probably other browsers) it indicates that the browser should not try common suffixes like ".com" if the hostname provided does not resolve. It's a convention common enough and useful enough that I can see why people would want a handy term for it. Regards, K. -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Karl Auer (ka...@biplane.com.au) http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer http://www.biplane.com.au/blog GPG fingerprint: B862 FB15 FE96 4961 BC62 1A40 6239 1208 9865 5F9A Old fingerprint: AE1D 4868 6420 AD9A A698 5251 1699 7B78 4EEE 6017
