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Re: concerning draft-josefsson-dns-url-08.txt

2003-06-29 11:47:31
Simon Josefsson wrote:
one added some text to clarify that it was actually intended to allow
for zero length dnsname's (to denote the DNS root).

This is technically correct, according to RFC 1034, but will be confusing.
"dns:" intuitively looks incomplete.  It's more conventional to name
the root domain in absolute form, as ".".  An interesting comparison:
the "dig" DNS lookup tool from the BIND folks doesn't accept "" as a
domain name; it insists on the root domain being specified as ".".

So I argue that requiring the root domain to be represented as "." in the
context of the URI, forbidding a zero-length <dnsname>, will make for a
clearer protocol, more likely to be implemented correctly.  This isn't
an absolute matter, though; both versions of the protocol are workable.

-zefram