Tbh, why don't all URLs just get normalised to have a dot at the end? Do we really want DNS Suffix lists?

That is my most hated "feature" in almost everything that does DNS.

Same?

And as for URLs without a trailing dot I think it's a problem that the server doesn't get to know what domain the client appended. Imagine a client simply sending Host: www. How is the server supposed to know which site the client wants without knowing what the client had appended.

The domain search feature is inherently incompatible with the TLS security model. I think it would have made more sense to make the trailing dot mandatory in https URLs as it would have better aligned with the security model of TLS. But I recall having seen cases where adding a trailing dot to https URLs would break things.

I understand that the intention is for curl to handle all of the corner cases correctly, and I think that makes sense for a project like curl. I can imagine how frustrating it can be, and at times I guess you just want to reject those corner cases.

(Please no one tell me it still exists, please. I don't want nightmares.)

With and without trailing dot does not necessarily refer to the same ip. The name example.com. always refers to example.com. where as example.com sometimes refers to example.com.internaldomain.tld.

That one bit me when I added a domain with a wildcard A-record to my dns search list. Suddenly example.com.internaldomaon.tld resolved. That caused quite a panic when I suddenly saw my own browser making a ton of requests to domains like doubleclick.net.mydomain.tld. in the webserver logs.

(As you might guess, I use dns blocklist for the big advertising domains, so only the subdomain version resolved).

Someone called it a dot release.

sounds like you have a good dot product to me