----- Original Message -----
From: "Brion Vibber" <brion(a)pobox.com>
On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 3:37 PM, Jay Ashworth
<jra(a)baylink.com> wrote:
While the topic of "how Mediawiki handles
URLs" is on the table, let
me point out today's Slashdot piece, which notes that ICANN is about to open
up the gTLD namespace...
*to everyone*, not just commercial registries.
Contemplate, if you will:
http://apple/
How will MW handle a FQDN with no dots in it, when that becomes
legal?
Those are already perfectly legal hostnames to have in URLs, and you see
single-part hostnames all the time on internal networks, either by eliding
the local domain part (since local DNS will resolve it) or by only using
single-part names to begin with.
For a common example: try linking to
http://localhost/ -- it works
just fine. :)
Sure. And http may not be the best example. There's lots of code
out there -- email address verifiers, for example -- that *requires* a dot
in a hostname.
I suppose "in theory" having
"apple" available is no worse than "apple.com"
(since you *could* have an "apple.com.mylocaldomain" already and have
to worry about which takes precedence), but in practice that sounds like
a crappy thing to do. :)
And you make an excellent point I hadn't gotten to yet: collisions between
such dotless FQDNs and internal hostnames are *much* more likely - especially
since the Usual Suspects in both namespaces are related so closely.
In practice, though, localhost and hosts on your lan -- in which case the
DNS lookup is *actually* often a dotted FQDN anyway by virtue of the
DNS resolver search facility -- are about the only places dotless FQDNs
are generally seen... and lots of code "protects" you from them.
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra(a)baylink.com
Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates
http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA
http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274