+---------- On Oct 14, Michael Wojcik said: | As I read the grammar given by RFC 1034 (Domain Names) in 3.5, The grammar specifies only the "preferred name syntax". Section 3.1 clearly allows dot-terminated names: When a user needs to type a domain name, the length of each label is omitted and the labels are separated by dots ("."). Since a complete domain name ends with the root label, this leads to a printed form which ends in a dot. We use this property to distinguish between: - a character string which represents a complete domain name (often called "absolute"). For example, "poneria.ISI.EDU."