RFC 819 (rfc819) - Page 1 of 18
Domain naming convention for Internet user applications
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
Network Working Group Zaw-Sing Su (SRI)
Request for Comments: 819 Jon Postel (ISI)
August 1982
The Domain Naming Convention for Internet User Applications
1. Introduction
For many years, the naming convention "@" has served the
ARPANET user community for its mail system, and the substring
"" has been used for other applications such as file transfer
(FTP) and terminal access (Telnet). With the advent of network
interconnection, this naming convention needs to be generalized to
accommodate internetworking. A decision has recently been reached to
replace the simple name field, "", by a composite name field,
"" [2]. This note is an attempt to clarify this generalized
naming convention, the Internet Naming Convention, and to explore the
implications of its adoption for Internet name service and user
applications.
The following example illustrates the changes in naming convention:
ARPANET Convention: Fred@ISIF
Internet Convention: A
The intent is that the Internet names be used to form a
tree-structured administrative dependent, rather than a strictly
topology dependent, hierarchy. The left-to-right string of name
components proceeds from the most specific to the most general, that
is, the root of the tree, the administrative universe, is on the
right.
The name service for realizing the Internet naming convention is
assumed to be application independent. It is not a part of any
particular application, but rather an independent name service serves
different user applications.
2. The Structural Model
The Internet naming convention is based on the domain concept. The
name of a domain consists of a concatenation of one or more . A domain can be considered as a region of jurisdiction for
name assignment and of responsibility for name-to-address
translation. The set of domains forms a hierarchy.
Using a graph theory representation, this hierarchy may be modeled as
a directed graph. A directed graph consists of a set of nodes and a
Su & Postel