Documentation not clear about what values DNS providers take

I'm currently both working on a script that uses the DNS feature of libcloud and also implementing the missing parts of the Route53 driver.

Based on reading the docs and API reference i'm having a hard time figuring out what values are acceptable.

I initially assumed that if i wanted to created www.example.com on a zone called example.com then my call to create_record would pass "www". However, Route53 only takes "www.example.com." and I wanted to check my assumption.

As far as I can tell from the upstream docs, linode can take both the FQDN and short "hostname" forms. And AFAICT, zerigo expects the short form.

So I adapted my AWS driver to append ".example.com." to whatever is passed to create_record. However list_records (which was already implemented by other contributors) is returning the FQDN form. So should i be strimming the zone name off the end of records it returns?

Restating this a little: Which of the following forms should create_record accept?

www
www.example.com
www.example.com.

And when I then call list_records(), which of these should I see as the name property in the list of objects returned?

What in the case of the FQDN example.com? In that case hostname is '' (in bind, i believe this is represented by '@'.