# Re: Final edits - summary of outstanding points.

Tim Berners-Lee (timbl@www3.cern.ch)
Wed, 20 Oct 93 17:41:20 +0100

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    Date: Wed, 20 Oct 93 17:41:20 +0100

    From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>

    Message-Id: <9310201641.AA03947@www3.cern.ch>

    To: Jon Knight <J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk>

    Subject: Re: Final edits - summary of outstanding points.

>>From: Jon Knight <J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk>
>Date: Wed, 20 Oct 93 0:50:39 BST

>I vote for allowing the trailing ``.'' in FQDNs in URLs. Although
many
>people drop the trailing dot in day-to-day usage, the _proper_
format of
>a FQDN does have a trailing dot. This can also make DNS lookups
>slightly faster and safer as the software knows not to attach any
local
>domains to it (there was a recent thread in one of the DNS or BIND
>related mailing lists about an obscure security flaw with some BIND
>versions when you present a domain name without a trailing dot).

>
>And this won't break anyone's code; I tried tried X Mosaic 1.2 and
it
>seems quite happy with either format!

What you say is true. Unfortunately your Mosaic global
history now contains two entries -- one with and one
without the dot! This can be cured too, but what happened was that
in the end as the DN did have to be FQ, and even on
FQDNs most people leave off the trailing dot all the time
and many are quite confused when they see it, I went
around removing trailing dots from a lot of URLs.
And now we enforce that in the spec. But your software
can add it before doing a gethostbyname and be faster.

>Jon

Tim

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