RFC 8700 – Fifty Years of RFCs | Hacker News Reader

RFC 8700 – Fifty Years of RFCs

tools.ietf.org

92 pointszdw12 comments

Hopefully, RFCs forced for a relatively long time the 'Open' nature of the Internet.

The low level protocols were saved from being proprietary. But companies moved the game to another space and things will only go worse with the globalization of the SaaS model.

Hey, at least we have Fastmail's jmap:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8620

Darius Kazemi, Mozilla fellow, has been going through an RFC a day for the past year, starting at the beginning:

https://write.as/365-rfcs/365-ietf-rfcs-a-50th-anniversary-d...

RSS: https://write.as/365-rfcs/feed/

OMG thank you so much; this is amazing!

I remember when ICQ was criticized for 'not playing nice' by implementing their own closed protocol. That was a rare exception back in the days, everybody seemed to have this tacit agreement that open protocols were better than closed ones. Now look where we are: AOL 2.0, and with no end to the mess in sight.

As an aside: I honestly miss the pagination from the plaintext variants of RFCs. I know it's considered a feature in RFCv3, but I do miss it.

(They were done away with in RFC 7990, see section 7.3.)

This was really nice when working with colleagues on an rfc “check out page n” instead of “search for this string” as anchors may be sometimes too broad when being specific.

What I’d love is some kind of line selection feature where a specific line can be linked to.

Line number/ paragraph is also an effective reference, specially with section number. Pages sound like forcing a round peg (specificpaper format) into a square hole ( digital docs)

I never really was fond of this idea.

I like pages as they allow me to visually separate content in smaller chunks, even more so than paragraphs alone which I find especially useful when going through very technical documents.

I really like PDFs for the same reason while some are saying pages in a digital document makes no sense. To each their own I guess.

I like to print longer documents, and PDFs are pretty much the best format for that purpose (in practice; in theory other formats could be better).

I wish browsers would implement CSS pagination properly.

FWIW, if you use the PDF version you will get pagination: https://tools.ietf.org/pdf/rfc8700

You can always link to a heading in the HTML version. It's not that much different.

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