looking for terminology recommendations concerning non-rooted FQDNs

[Brian Reichert <reichert () numachi com>]

I'm trying to nail down some terminology for doc purposes.

The issue: most resources on the net freely describe a fully-qualified
domian name ('FQDN') as to exclude the root domain; i.e, they exclude
the trailing dot as mandated by some RFCs such as RFC 1535:

  http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1535.txt

    An absolute "rooted" FQDN is of the format {name}{.} A non
    "rooted" domain name is of the format {name}

I'm trying to come up with some human-facing terminology that names
these two forms:

        "a.b.c."
        "a.b.c"

Many resources on the net use the term 'rooted domain name' for the
former, but they're collectively ambigious about what the other
form should be called.

Does anyone here have any solid advice, or can point me to a resource
that would call out useful conventions?

This was all fueled by Microsoft's client code apparently stripping
the root domain from PTR record results; I'm separately trying to
track down why that's occuring...

-- 
Brian Reichert                          <reichert () numachi com>
BSD admin/developer at large