[ErikCorry]

Forgotten? No mention of why we should think they are forgotten outside the headline.

[candiddevmike]

Most things are now vendor proprietary and not designed for interoperability. RFCs are forgotten because you can't monetize an RFC.

[lexszero_]

Interestingly, ISO standard documents are sold for a non-insignificant price and DRMed, while people writing them are volunteers and/or paid by their employers to participate in standardization committees. A company willing to build equipment for an industry running on ISO/IEC communication protocols (like electric power distribution) may have to pay thousands for relevant standards, or rely on someone's interpretation of said standards to implement the protocol before they even begin, not considering certification costs.

[woodruffw]

This is a very funny thing to assert on a forum that's entirely delivered via openly standardized (via IETF, W3C, etc.) technologies!

(Also, you certainly can monetize an RFC. In fact, that's the norm in a lot of RFC categories: the various PKCS-derived RFCs are a direct extension of various patented standards that RSA[1] sold software atop of.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Security

[RHSeeger]

As part of my normal work, I linked and quoted part of an RFC just this week. They're not forgotten, just... less remembered, I guess.

[1970-01-01]

Clickbait gonna bait.

[zaik]

Outside of my friend group, no one uses XMPP, the internet standard for chat, they only know about walled gardens and custom protocols by VC startups now :(

[SunlitCat]

Since when became XMPP "the internet standard for chat"? What about IRC[0]? :(

[0]: RFCs 1459, 2810 - 2813, 7194.

[MYEUHD]

Whatsapp, Zoom and Kik Messenger use XMPP under the hood.

Just because it's not well-known doesn't mean it's not widely used

[lou1306]

Come on, of course there will be some protocols that are more obscure than others, but the overall concept of RFCs is far from "forgotten".

Besides, a lot of these walled chat gardens roll their own XMPP/Jabber thingy behind the scenes.

[loeg]

XMPP has nothing going for it.

[ackreq]

Nowadays, my friend, people just copy, paste, or vibecode everything. If you (or anyone) think they’re not forgotten, you’re one of the few who still read and understand the RFCs. Said that in the post too.

[Anon1096]

The people building the infrastructure powering the internet at cloudflare, major cloud providers, isps, etc are all regularly reading and referencing RFCs (from experience). People who aren't reading them now weren't reading them in the past either, we don't need some RFC moral panic.

[woodruffw]

I don’t know what niche you inhabit, but anecdotally the overwhelming majority of engineers I know have consulted an RFC. RFCs are an active component in the Internet; you need to at least reference them (if not fully read them) to understand how various parts of the Internet interoperate.

(It seems extremely unlikely that the average non-junior engineer hasn’t opened up RFC 3339 or one of the HTTP caching RFCs, just for example.)

[alterom]

Yeah, as if reading and understanding RFCs was the pastime of the commoner in Ye Olde Dayse.

Or as if the vibe-coder of today would've totally™ definitely© be the type of person to peruse the RFCs.

It's like saying the the proof of, say, Seifert-van Kampen theorem is "forgotten" because nowadays, my friend, people ask ChatGPT to write out solutions to their math homework.

[James_K]

The fact that you are able to send this message over the internet is proof that a quite large population of people are still reading and still understand internet standards.