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Comment by WarOnPrivacy | Hacker News Reader

> everything is a subdomain of something, even "rip" itself, which in a certain sense is a subdomain of the DNS root "."

Now that he's explained it, I'm annoyed that we use . to represent the root zone and to delimit between zones. Pick a lane already.

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Why? We do the same thing with file path for example, with / being both the root and the separator. In both cases you can think of the character as the separator if you prefer it to have a single role, and then the root is just the empty string.

Oh, or we could add drive specifiers (maybe letters for ease of typing?) and then a reserved character before the root path separator to signify the change in context.

Something like c:/dir_name could really take off…

I find this snarky comment hilarious while also being disgusted at the implication

www.example.com.c:

I laughed, but wanted to acknowledge that the single tree filesystem is a pretty great invention. I like how the plan 9 ethos is "if it's a tree, it goes in the filesystem somewhere" dns.. in the filesystem. html dom? looks like a tree to me, in it goes.

And I think this is the fundamental problem with the windows registry. Because it sounds like a really great idea. "A dedicated database to store all configs in" However in reality it sort of sucks. I think this is because now you have a second strange tree that has different special access methods and usage.

Except that is how the registry works. Get-ChildItem -Path HKCU:\ | Select-Object Name works exactly how you think it will.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/sampl...

An interesting functional distinction between the unix filesystem hierarchy and the DNS hierarchy. is that in the unix filesystem directories are distinct named entities and in DNS there is no such concept(closest you get are glue records)

Actually the root is a null (empty) label rather than "."; dots are delimiters of labels, there is an empty label after "." in FQDNs. See RFC 1034 Section 3.1.

Having all addresses be rooted in an untypeable null isn’t much better.

It is not null, it's an empty string.

You should read the referenced RFC, it’s right there.

“””Because all domain names end at the root, which has a null string for a label…”””

"null string" or "nil string" or "empty string" are all the same thing.

IDK why we're even talking about this though.

I am not sure why you are being down voted, intuitively I would expect the exact opposite, and my colleague and I say "group dot" out loud as a shortcut when we mean "group dot myorg dot com" at work.

People are passionate about DNS.

I run DNS servers for fun. But I also have a 1961 convertible that I drive around with missing floorboards and rusted rockers. I will never restore it.

Root zone is an empty label, rendered in packet as 0x00h. The label contains a length of the label, the root zone length is NULL, none, zero, or "".

We use dot "." to split labels. wwww.example.com has 4 labels:

"www" . "example" . "com" . "" (NULL, root label, 0 length).

Because we can't print NULL/"", it looks like a single dot at the end. But this single dot separate com from root label, which is empty "". We ommit this label and this dot.

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