You are arguing against facts that I have already clearly demonstrated. Get out Wireshark and test. Once again, mistakes made by an application-layer program (

You are arguing against facts that I have already clearly demonstrated. Get out Wireshark and test. Once again, mistakes made by an application-layer program (or spec!) do not invalidate the facts of underlying layers. The hostname will always resolve to the same IP. A search domain doesn't change that, it changes what hostname is resolved. (BTW: hostnames have existed since long before whatwg or even the web. I'm not sure why you would think whatwg have the authoritative definition of hostname.) Also, since you like specs, here you go: "every domain name ends with the null label of the root", implying that the domain `foo` is, in fact, canonically, the domain `foo.` - RFC1035, November 1987. (The RFCs contemplate search domains as well, and mention that the final dot might be used as a cue to the application/library whether or not to apply the search domains, but that's entirely an application/library decision and changes the effective hostname/FQDN.) In short: I never said that browsers and servers don't in fact treat them differently, I said that's a bug. You can't say "well they do it that way and the spec they wrote says it" as reasoning for it.