----- Original Message -----
From: "Brion Vibber" brion@pobox.com
On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 3:37 PM, Jay Ashworth jra@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:
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