Internet Standards Documents

Let's look at what can be called the "official documentation of the Internet" now! We'll refer to these standards documents throughout this course.

We'll cover the following

Why Care About Internet Standards?

Standardization has allowed us to achieve interoperability. Different organizations and vendors can develop hardware and software to be connected to the Internet. Unless they agree on a protocol, their hardware and software wouldn’t be able to talk to each other. Standardization is all interested stakeholders sitting together, debating and agreeing on a protocol or design.

Also, it’s important to know what’s out there, who designed what and why.

Also, you’d know where to submit your ideas in case you come up with a better design for any of the protocols we’re going to study.

What Is an RFC?

  • An RFC or Request For Comments is a document that contains proposals for new protocols or systems.

  • Today, RFCs are submitted to and handled by the Internet Society which has a sub-body called the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This sub-body works on the standardization of Internet protocols and systems.

  • An RFC is then deliberated on by experts, revised and then hopefully, eventually adopted as a standard.

Who Writes RFCs?

  • RFCs are generally written by those who work at IETF, Internet researchers, and specialists. However, an RFC can be written by anyone! Yes, even you can write one. Just write up your findings and submit them to the Internet society’s Independent Submissions page!

  • All Internet protocols, like hypertext transport protocol (HTTP) used in the World Wide Web, are described by one or more RFCs.

History

  • RFCs were started by Steve Crocker to document details of ARPANET while it was being created. These documents were called Requests For Comments to encourage discussion and not seem too assertive. They used to be written on a typewriter and distributed around ARPA’s office as physical copies with requests for comments.

Contents of an RFC

  • RFC’s generally start off with a header that contains the category of the document, its identification number, the name(s) of the author(s), and the date.
  • Then the document contains its title, a status, and an abstract.
  • Then a table of contents after which the document starts.
  • The document usually starts with an introduction.

Here is an example of the first page RFC standards document, RFC 2046.

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An example of the first page of an RFC
An example of the first page of an RFC

Types of RFCs

Standards Track

There are two kinds of standards documents: Proposed Standard, and Internet Standard.

Proposed Standard documents are well reviewed and stable but not as mature as an Internet Standard document. Internet Standard documents are technically competent, practically applicable, and publicly recognized. Perhaps one of the most important standard documents that we know about from the Internet history lesson is the one on the Internet protocol, RFC 791.

IETF has documented its internet standards process in RFC 2026. Have a look if you want to learn more about it.

Historic

These RFCs are usually obsolete and contain details about technologies that are not in use anymore.

Unknown

Some RFCs cannot be categorized or often do not specify any new standards or findings. These are categorized as unknown.

You can browse all of these categories of RFCs on the RFC retrieve page.

Quick Quiz!

1

Standardization enables ______

A)

Interoperability

B)

The best design practices to be followed

C)

Optimization

Question 1 of 20 attempted

Now that we have a solid foundation to start learning all about computer networks, let’s get right into it from the next chapter!

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