From a pragmatic point of view, either option would appear exactly the same to the client in general terms (I think), so it really could be something decided by the implementation (and not necessarily explicitly defined by the spec).
As long as all clients were set up the same way... if some were using "" and some were using <actualname>, then obviously the beviour would be different in the two cases. That said, I personally prefer option ii) as well, because if there ever
comes a time where more stuff is attached to the virtual host than just a name, it would be simpler to support, I think.
I think the issue is that the whole purpose of virtual hosts is somewhat unclear. I think the general idea is to be along the same lines as virtual hosts in an http server, so the virtual host might well be seen as something like the dns name or ip address + port that the client knows the server as (before proxying etc). In that case there is very likely the case where you want to map many names to a single virtual host... however in this scenario you would very definitely also want the client to be populating the virtual hosts parameter on every connection open. -- Rob
