Why are Internet standards called “Request for Comments”?

Re:Why are Internet standards called “Request for Comments”? by tptacek on Sunday December 01, 2013 @02:32PM (#6828811)

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.

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Re:Why are Internet standards called “Request for Comments”? by jordanb on Sunday December 01, 2013 @04:57PM (#6829564)

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.

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Re:Why are Internet standards called “Request for Comments”? by icebraining on Sunday December 01, 2013 @06:33PM (#6830012)

Take my uninformed opinion with a massive grain of salt, but it seems to me that the W3C is mostly glad to leave the HTML5 nonsense to the WHATWG while they work on the stuff they really care about, such as the Semantic Web.

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Re:Why are Internet standards called “Request for Comments”? by sgtpepper on Sunday December 01, 2013 @07:38PM (#6830341)

Why "loved" in the past tense? There are new joke RFCs every year: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6921.txt

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Re:Why are Internet standards called “Request for Comments”? by plorkyeran on Sunday December 01, 2013 @08:08PM (#6830487)

HTML5 is the product of WHATWG, which was specifically created to work around the fact that the W3C was trying its hardest to be utterly irrelevant.

> The WHATWG was founded by individuals of Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software in 2004, after a W3C workshop. Apple, Mozilla and Opera were becoming increasingly concerned about the W3C’s direction with XHTML, lack of interest in HTML and apparent disregard for the needs of real-world authors.

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Re:Why are Internet standards called “Request for Comments”? by contingencies on Sunday December 01, 2013 @07:01PM (#6830154)

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.

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Re:Why are Internet standards called “Request for Comments”? by noselasd on Sunday December 01, 2013 @05:22PM (#6829678)

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

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Re:Why are Internet standards called “Request for Comments”? by girvo on Monday December 02, 2013 @01:10AM (#6832043)

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.

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