Request for Comments

A Request for Comments (RFC) document is
one of a series of numbered Internet informational documents and standards very
widely followed by both commercial software and freeware in the Internet and
Unix communities. They are
now published under the aegis of the Internet
Society (ISOC, an open organization whose mission is developing
the Internet for the benefit of people throughout the world) and
its technical standards-setting bodies.

The basic communication protocols which the
Internet uses to operate are all specified in RFCs, for instance.
However, RFCs cover many topics in addition to standards, such as
introductions to new research ideas and status memos about the
Internet. While few RFCs are standards, almost all Internet
standards are recorded in RFCs.

History and current organization

The RFC series of documents on networking began in as part of the original ARPA wide area
networking ARPANETproject.

Today, it is the official publication channel for the Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board
(IAB), and the broader Internet community. RFCs are published by
the RFC Editor, who is supported by the ISOC, but is under
the general direction of the IAB.

Once published and issued a number, an RFC is never canceled or
depublished; it is instead superseded by the publication of a new
one. To determine which RFCs are actually active Internet standards
and which ones have been superseded, one must consult the official
list, Internet Standard 1 (STD 1), which itself is republished
regularly as an RFC.

How to obtain RFCs

RFCs can be obtained on the Internet from the RFC Editor (http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc.html),
the IETF (rfc.html),
or many other sites, principally using the Web, but also
through anonymous FTP, gopher, and other Internet
document-retrieval systems.

Every RFC is available as ASCII text and may be available in other formats,
depending on the author. The definitive version of any
standards-track specifications is always the ASCII version.

A complete RFC index in text format (iesg/1rfc_index)
is available from the IETF website. Any published RFC can be
directly found by inserting the number into the following URL:

rfc/rfc# (replace # with the
RFC number).

How RFCs are made (the RFC process)

The RFCs are produced in a process that is different from that
used in formal standards organizations such as ANSI. They can be floated by technical experts
acting on their own initiative and reviewed by the Internet at
large. Practically speaking, standards-track RFCs are usually
produced by experts participating in working groups which first
publish what the IETF calls Internet-Drafts; this
facilitates initial rounds of review before documents become
RFCs.

The RFC tradition of pragmatic, experience-driven,
after-the-fact standard writing done by individuals or small
working groups has important advantages over the more formal,
committee-driven process typical of ANSI or ISO.

Emblematic of some of these advantages is the existence of a
flourishing tradition of joke RFCs. Usually at least one a year is
published, usually on April Fool's Day.

The RFCs are most remarkable for how well they work - they
manage to have neither the ambiguities that are usually rife in
informal specifications, nor the committee-perpetrated misfeatures
that often haunt formal standards, and they define a network that
has grown to truly worldwide proportions.

For more details about RFCs and the RFC process, see RFC 2026,
"The Internet Standards Process, Revision 3".

History

RFC 1, entitled "Host Software", was written by Steve Crocker from the
University of California, Los Angeles, and published on April 7, 1969.

The initial RFCs were apparently typewritten and circulated on
hard copy among the ARPA researchers. Once ARPANET was fully
functional by December 1969, subsequent RFCs were drafted and
circulated over the network.

Douglas Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at
SRI was the first Network Information
Center as well as one of the first two nodes on the network
(the other was UCLA). The sociologist Thierry
Bardini has pointed out that ARC personnel authored a large
number of the early RFCs.

One advantage of the tradition of never depublishing obsolete
RFCs is that they form a continuous historical record of the
evolution of Internet standards. Lawyers will notice that this is roughly analogous to
the tradition in common law countries (including the United States,
where the Internet was born) of never depublishing case opinions,
but instead overruling them with new ones.

E-mail RFCs

This is an important early RFC from the IETF that specified the protocol for transferring e-mail messages between computers on the Internet. Many additions have been made to it, but it remained a standard for many years until obsoleted by RFC 2821(the number is not a coincidence: it was reserved for this use).

This is an important early RFC from the IETF that specified the format of e-mail messages exchanged between computers on the Internet. Many additions have been made to it, but it remained a standard for many years until obsoleted by RFC 2822 (the number is not a coincidence: it was reserved for this use).

This standard specifies a syntax for text messages that are sent between computer users, within the framework of electronic mail messages. This standard is about text-only messages. The syntax for sending other types of messages, such as binary or structured data, is specified as an extension of this standard by the MIME document series: RFC 2045, RFC 2046, RFC 2047, RFC 2049.

RFC 2047 specifies
a standard way of encoding non US-ASCII characters into a string
that identifies both the character set to use and the actual
characters. The result of the encoding will be US-ASCII, and can be
transmitted in Internet mail and decoded appropriately on the
receiving end. This encoding is necessary in the first place
because many characters in non-English languages can not be
represented in 7-bit ASCII.

There are some mail clients that are not RFC 2047 Compliant, if
you are using one of this clients you are strongly encuraged to
change your mail client or to update it to a compliant
version:

This provides a way to register extensions of codes for language names in ISO 639. The current reviewer of new tags and maintainer of the registry (http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso639/iana-lang-assignments.html) is Michael Everson.

Random RFCs

This is a memo and status report of the
DARPA Internet Gateway. It deals with two areas:
gateway procedures and message formats. Topics include information
on the forwarding of internet datagrams, various protocols
supported by the gateway, and specific gateway software. Unlike
many other RFCs, it does not list any implementation
specifics.