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According to Wikipedia, fully qualified host names end with a trailing period. Jonathan de Boyne-Pollard writes in No, that dot in the domain name of the URL is not a mistake (emphasis mine):
I omitted the trailing dot in the domain name in the http://example.com./ URL because it was a typographical error.
No, it wasn't. It was there for a reason. It made the domain name a fully qualified one, and thus unambiguous and not prone to search path spoofing.
I can use relative host names to refer to hosts within the same domain. What would happen if I set up a host named com
on a local network? google.com.
should still refer to Google as it's clearly fully qualified, but what about google.com
? Shouldn't it refer to the machine in my local network? Would it? Why (not)? What network setup or services influence the behavior?