The Domain Naming Convention for Internet User Applications

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.