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The RFC editor pages contain an overview on RFCs and an RFC FAQ. On Ohio State University pages, in the Internet Requests for Comments (RFC) section, there are some annotated lists of those RFCs which might be particularly interesting to normal Internet users or to people who are in the process of getting acquainted with the technologies of the Internet. Examples include Internet Users' Glossary (which is rather old though) and Users' Security Handbook. They belong to the FYI series (For Your Information) of RFCs, which are typically informative documents intended for a broad audience (though often dated). In contrast with them, "standard track" RFCs are mostly rather technical and intended for specialists in a rather narrow field.
are often called standards - this may apply even to RFCs which explicitly state that they do not define a standard of any kind! - but according to the official terminology, only a few of them have been designated as Internet standards. An Internet standard has, in addition to an RFC number, an STD number, which does not change even if the RFC number is changed; for example, the IP protocol is defined by STD 5 which is currently RFC 791. Only a few Internet standards have the status "required", which means that they shall be applied everywhere on the Internet; other Internet standards are "recommended" or just "elective". The "required" standards mostly define the fundamental protocols which are indispensable for the whole operation of the Internet. The system of RFCs is described in RFC 2026, The Internet Standards Process. Nominally, RFC is short for Request for Comments. This is quite misleading, since when a document has been published as an RFC, no amount of commenting can possibly change it! Instead, if a protocol is changed, a new RFC with a new number is written.
mention it at all in its list of current RFCs, and the official RFC registry by IANA lists it with status UNKNOWN! There is a large number of RFCs which do not belong to "standards track" protocols at all; that is, they are not intended to be or to become standards of any kind. Such RFCs can be purely informational (in a broad sense which covers poems too) or "experimental". See also RFCs like RFC 1149, A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers (dated 1990-0401).
Note that not all RFC repositories are up-to-date. And note that if you fetch an RFC by number, there is no guarantee that it is a current RFC on its topic. It might have been superseded by a newer RFC. When in doubt, use an archive which contains information about the current status of RFCs.
RFC editor maintains official documentation which contains information about RFC availability from different sources and in different formats. List of RFC Repositories mentions the following FTP servers as primary distribution sites: nis.nsf.net, nisc.jvnc.net, ftp.isi.edu, wuarchive.wustl.edu, src.doc.ic.ac.uk, ftp.ncren.net, ftp.sesqui.net, ftp.nic.it, ftp.imag.fr, www.normos.org. But a server closer to you might be more convenient, in terms of access time and user intereface. RFC editor has a search forms for searching for RFCs by number or header keyword. Header keywords refer to the name (title) of the RFC, list of authors, and other header information, not the textual content. Using such a search you get information about the current status of the RFC, including information about being partially changed by newer RFCs ("Updated by.."). For your convenience, here we have simplified versions of the query forms:
Get RFC Find RFC(s) with the word(s) occurring
For searching by content keywords, you can use a search service provided by the Internet FAQ Consortium, e.g. using the following simplified interface:
Search for RFCs containing the word or phrase
The search gives a list which is ordered by the RFC number in the decreasing order, i.e. from newest to oldest. But to check the status, it's probably best to consult the Active RFC Index. Other services for searching for RFCs include:
Eunet's RFC Index, with its own search form SunSITE Denmark's RFC Archive. Lynn Wheeler's IETF RFC Index (with lists of RFCs by date, author, etc) Yahoo's Computers and Internet: Standards: RFCs.
Format of RFCs
The basic format of RFCs is plain text (Ascii text). The internal structure of the text is specified in RFC 2223. There are RFCs available in HTML format too, as well as in other formats like PostScript, produced by different tools, but the plain text format is the official one. In particular, the Internet FAQ Consortium maintains an RFC archive, which seems to contain RFCs in a format produced by automatic conversion from plain text to HTML. The format isn't much better than plain text in its appearance, but references to other RFCs are hyperlinks. (There is a somewhat similar collection by FH Kln, namely RFCs in HTML Format.) Freesoft's RFC collection makes more extensive use of HTML, but it covers just a small part of RFCs (though with many important RFCs among them). There's also a large repository of RFCs in frames-based hypertext format at Zvon. RFC 2629 contains a proposal on writing Internet-Drafts and RFCs in an XML-based markup language.