Why are Internet standards called “Request for Comments”?

[tptacek]

It's interesting and a little ironic to observe how the IETF has evolved over the last 30 years.

Time was, the IETF was more than the standardization effort for the Internet; it was also an intellectual response to the institutional standards body of the day, the CCITT/ITU-T. Where the ITU was bogged down by process, riven by commercial interests and infighting, and unapproachable by researchers, the IETF was animated by "rough consensus and working code".

Clearly, in the contest between the ITU-T (CLNP) and IETF (IP), the ITU-T lost.

Presumably, many hundreds of people were involved in telecoms standardization at ITU-T. Where do we suppose those people went? Did they just give up on their work? Or did they instead migrate to the IETF? Either way: the IETF functions more like the ITU-T today than like the IETF of 1994. "Standards" are owned by denizens of the IETF process; new functionality unknown to the Internet is specified in standards documents before it's ever implemented, or, better yet, "standardized" in opposition to working code.

I'd tentatively suggest that the IETF has served its purpose, and is now at risk of outliving it.

[jordanb]

This is an interesting perspective. I always loved the "Joke" RFCs from the earlier days of the IETF. It's sad to see the organization get away from that ethos.

What are your thoughts on the W3C? It seems like they spent the early 2000s going down the path you describe with XHTML, but with HTML5, they've rediscovered "rough consensus and working code," albeit driven entirely by the big browser vendors.

[contingencies]

I'd tentatively suggest that the IETF has served its purpose, and is now at risk of outliving it.

This matches my own experience, as the author of multiple internet standards drafts and someone who asked them whether it would be possible to open a group to discuss financial networking. What a hornet's nest that stirred up!

Key examples of outdated properties include: finnicky document format requirements (straight from the 1970s), no unicode support within documents (PITA), document character width limitations that can prevent the effective presentation of required information (no fix for this), monolingual nature of its website and resources, and its own bureaucracy despite its official stance: "this is not a bureaucracy".

It occurs to me that we could replace the IETF RFC process with a git repo or a blockchain. Github should probably do this proactively.

[noselasd]

Many of them probably went to do similar work at other bodies such as 3GPP - which have managed to produce successful protocols and networks.

[girvo]

I read an amazing article about all that... I think it was focused on TCP/IP, and the big telcos ideas competing. I wish I knew what the link was.

[Slackwise]

I like how hovering over "kudos", in an attempt to understand what it is, automatically performs an action I didn't want to perform. And there is no undo.

Great UI there, guys. I like how you focus on aesthetic novelty instead of functionality, but I guess that explains why you're hiding the UI all over the site until you hover over crap [1].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation

[kyberias]

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. It's refreshing to hear the voice of reason.

[john_b]

This is yet another reason to use a Javascript whitelist in your browser.

[shortformblog]

Considering that Svbtle has been around for like a year and a half now and it's not a particularly annoying UI scheme (rather one with more of a novelty element to it), can we get past debating about the Kudos button? I mean, it's not relevant to the article at all and it's not fair to the author, who had nothing to do with the feature.

That said, so people can catch up:

Here's some backstory on Svbtle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742314

Here's Dustin Curtis responding to criticism over it: http://dcurt.is/unkudo

[dredmorbius]

Add to global stylesheet:

    .kudo.able.clearfix {display: none;}

(Though I agree fully with your comments.)

[startling]

What does it do?

[waterlion]

Is what passes for a blog post? Copy-pasting 4 paragraphs out of a book?

[drakaal]

The Internet is all about free exchange of information... Copyright be darned. :-)

Worse it isn't really even a good copy paste.

I don't even like WikiPedia, and it is a much better explanation on this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_Comments

I consider this the definitive origin story of RFC: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/steve-crocker/a...

[SilasX]

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em! On your own blog, do a cut-n-paste of what you got from googling a common question, and get the same attention!

[wpietri]

One of the things that I love about RFCs is that they're an existence proof.

Sometimes I'll get asked, "How can we have a successful organization without a lot of top-down control of X?" where X is something like architecture or process or coding standards or furniture choice. When people see problems, they imagine solutions pushed through a power structure. And of course, they imagine themselves as the ones in power, forgetting how many bullshit edicts they've had to deal with over the years.

The Internet and its RFCs are my favorite existence proof that you don't need centralized control to get good design and reliable systems. Indeed, you could argue that the Internet, beat out the other early networks because it wasn't centrally controlled.

[ams6110]

Makes sense to request comments and input as standards are being developed, but I always wondered why these documents never graduate from "RFC" to "Specification" which is what they ultimately really are.

[KC8ZKF]

They can and do become Internet Standards, or STDs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_standard

[tiffani]

It's interesting that the name "Request for Comments" invokes "Oh, this is a club that I can play in too," as this is the impression I've gotten as I've read increasingly more of them lately and learn how they come to exist at all.