
Why are Internet standards called “Request for Comments”? - jasoncrawford
http://blog.jasoncrawford.org/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.

~~~
icebraining
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.

------
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation)

~~~
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742314)

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

~~~
gphilip
Dustin Curtis' "response to the critcism" in that second link consists of:

1\. Quoting a well-articulated email from yet another reader who felt deceived
by the trickery; and,

2\. (After a preface stating how he finds it amusing that so many people are
bothered about this button) The following high-level technical overview of
_what happens_ behind the scenes when someone's kudos are volunteered willy-
nilly:

    
    
      Here’s what it actually does: when you hover over the button, a CSS transform animation is activated which fills 
      the circle. After 1 second (the length of the animation), it fires a request to the server which increments an 
      otherwise meaningless number by exactly one.
    

This is the full extent of his response. As far as I could figure out, this
"response to criticism" addresses the following introductory paragraph of his
interlocutor's email:

    
    
      I was curious about the Kudos button you mention in your http://dcurt.is/web-standards article. I hovered over it 
      with my mouse pointer, and then it said “don’t move”. I didn’t move. Then it said “sent”. Apparently someone 
      invented a button that does not need to be pressed in order to be triggered.
    

And totally ignores the sentiment communicated by the more weighty second
paragraph which concludes with:

    
    
      I very humbly request that you kindly decrement the Kudos statistic by one unit in order to compensate for the 
      one that I definitely did not intend to send until it was forcefully withdrawn from me by a deceitful human 
      interface.
    

Did Dustin Curtis really miss the subtle (svbtle?) sarcasm of that first
paragraph, or am I just imagining things?

~~~
xerophtye
Wait a minute, so he didn't realize that the criticism is that it performs a
function without me wanting to perform it, and thinks the criticism is that "i
feel it sucks out my soul" -_- Seriously, why DID the GP link to this?

------
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](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...](http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/steve-crocker/all/)

------
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](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.

