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Seeing then FQDN with the trailing dot I wonder how much software breaks when you use it. I bet the duplicate check here doesn't treat homepage.ntlworld.com. an

by ah- 11y ago

Seeing then FQDN with the trailing dot I wonder how much software breaks when you use it. I bet the duplicate check here doesn't treat homepage.ntlworld.com. and homepage.ntlworld.com as equal.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
JdeBP is famous for his ungodly pedantry, so it'd be blasphemous for me not to honor RFC 1738 [1]. [1] http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/web-fully-qualified-domain-name.html http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/we...
- nly 11y ago
  Wrt hostnames RFC 1738 just refers back to 1034/35, which came 7 years earlier. It'd be pretty sad if we couldn't get this right after 28+ years
- bshimmin 11y ago
  He's also famous enough that whenever I see ntlworld.com [1] I immediately think, "Ah, must be JdBP - that'll be worth reading." [1] It's actually slightly astonishing his hosting still works at that URL given that NTL was consumed by Virgin nearly a decade ago.
  - darkr 11y ago
    I must admit, I felt a pang of nostalgia seeing that domain name. Must have been nearly 15 years ago that we got our super-fast 64k connection with free ntlworld.com web hosting, and we could finally have always-on internet at home. Oh how things have changed..
batou 11y ago
Actually none from experience. It's there for a really good reason. Say you want to visit www.hahaha.com but your network admin is a rotten bastard, and this does happen a lot in corporate networks, well what happens is they set up a DNS record of www.hahaha.com.myevilcorporation.local and set your default domain suffix to myevilcorporation.local. When you hit www.hahaha.com you don't go to www.hahaha.com; you go to some internal site. The browser tends not to give you any clues about this so you just carry on without knowing. If you visit www.hahaha.com. (note the trailing dot) then you go to www.hahaha.com. as that dot is the root of the DNS heirarchy and myevilcorporation.local never ever resolves. Of course this throws all sorts of warnings if you are using SSL but for the average user and site, that isn't necessarily true. Hell we did it years ago and deployed an internal CA cert to all our workstations so it looks like a ton of our corporate sites are actually internet-based and SSL covered but are on internal networks only with private certs. I suspect that this is less of an issue these days and browsers have protection against this but I wouldn't be 100% sure of it. So in conclusion, it's really important.
- amalcon 11y ago
  Public service announcement: It's best to use "example.com" (or .net, .org, etc) for this sort of thing, because there's no real server there to accidentally send traffic to or alter the search rankings of. It's not usually that big a deal, but every so often someone will paste the wrong thing or an automated process will misinterpret something. It's better if this happens to a nonexistent domain.
  - vacri 11y ago
    There is a real server at example.com - check out http://example.com/ http://example.com/ - or, if you want to be secure, it's also on https :) example.com is the standard FQDN to use for examples, though. http://example.com/ http://example.com/ links to the documentation...

by ah- 11y ago

Seeing then FQDN with the trailing dot I wonder how much software breaks when you use it. I bet the duplicate check here doesn't treat homepage.ntlworld.com. and homepage.ntlworld.com as equal.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

JdeBP is famous for his ungodly pedantry, so it'd be blasphemous for me not to honor RFC 1738 [1]. [1] http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/web-fully-qualified-domain-name.html http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/we...

nly 11y ago
Wrt hostnames RFC 1738 just refers back to 1034/35, which came 7 years earlier. It'd be pretty sad if we couldn't get this right after 28+ years
bshimmin 11y ago
He's also famous enough that whenever I see ntlworld.com [1] I immediately think, "Ah, must be JdBP - that'll be worth reading." [1] It's actually slightly astonishing his hosting still works at that URL given that NTL was consumed by Virgin nearly a decade ago.
- darkr 11y ago
  I must admit, I felt a pang of nostalgia seeing that domain name. Must have been nearly 15 years ago that we got our super-fast 64k connection with free ntlworld.com web hosting, and we could finally have always-on internet at home. Oh how things have changed..

batou 11y ago

Actually none from experience. It's there for a really good reason. Say you want to visit www.hahaha.com but your network admin is a rotten bastard, and this does happen a lot in corporate networks, well what happens is they set up a DNS record of www.hahaha.com.myevilcorporation.local and set your default domain suffix to myevilcorporation.local. When you hit www.hahaha.com you don't go to www.hahaha.com; you go to some internal site. The browser tends not to give you any clues about this so you just carry on without knowing. If you visit www.hahaha.com. (note the trailing dot) then you go to www.hahaha.com. as that dot is the root of the DNS heirarchy and myevilcorporation.local never ever resolves. Of course this throws all sorts of warnings if you are using SSL but for the average user and site, that isn't necessarily true. Hell we did it years ago and deployed an internal CA cert to all our workstations so it looks like a ton of our corporate sites are actually internet-based and SSL covered but are on internal networks only with private certs. I suspect that this is less of an issue these days and browsers have protection against this but I wouldn't be 100% sure of it. So in conclusion, it's really important.

amalcon 11y ago
Public service announcement: It's best to use "example.com" (or .net, .org, etc) for this sort of thing, because there's no real server there to accidentally send traffic to or alter the search rankings of. It's not usually that big a deal, but every so often someone will paste the wrong thing or an automated process will misinterpret something. It's better if this happens to a nonexistent domain.
- vacri 11y ago
  There is a real server at example.com - check out http://example.com/ http://example.com/ - or, if you want to be secure, it's also on https :) example.com is the standard FQDN to use for examples, though. http://example.com/ http://example.com/ links to the documentation...