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In general I have a lot of respect for pre-WWW, special-purpose protocol design. I don't see it as short-sighted, so much as the world wide web having been _that_ big a paradigm shift.

That said, the date on this one is from 1997. Amazon was already selling books via the Web at that point, so I'm not totally sure what the use case is.

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so I'm not totally sure what the use case is.

That seems to be true for a lot of RFCs; a small number of them are so important and widely used that I've memorised their numbers (768, 791, 793, 821, 959, 1081, 2616, etc.) but then there's plenty of others which seem to have been merely "someone thought it was a good idea".

Mayhaps they were “Requests For Comments” rather than “International Standards” or “Specifications” with some sort of recognized enforcement body behind them?

It seems as though good “Walled Gardens” make “Good Neighbors”, so requests for comments may not be as important as they once were?

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