Technical standards

See also standards on the HTML page.

FAQs, RFCs and all that...

An assortment of information sources, and pointers to miscelleneous internet standards

FAQs

• Sunsite FAQ archive (excellent!)
• Also: Ohio FAQ Search, Eindhoven, www.faqs.org.

RFCs, FYIs...

The RFCs (Request For Comments) are the document series of the Internet Architecture Board; many of them have the status of Internet standards. Some of the RFCs are informational; these have an alternative designation as FYIs (For Your Information). The documents are also available in their draft stage, when they are known as Internet Drafts. For more information on all this, see the IETF home page. Are you confused, yet - the IETF have a glossary, and there's some information about RFCs, sponsored by the Internet Society, at www.rfc-editor.org.

Many of the RFCs are `standards track' documents - they are not yet full internet standards, but aim to be. It is an IETF requirement that a specification must have two interoperable implementations before it can become a standard. Standards have numbers STDxxx, and there is a list of them at sunsite in <http://sunsite.org.uk/rfc/std-index.txt>, with individual ones under <http://sunsite.org.uk/rfc/std/>.

• Nexor's RFC search and Internet Draft search (both are good searches which point to local mirrors of the respective collections).
• RFC collections:
  • Sunsite UK has a large RFC collection in a large flat directory, plus a copy of the RFC index. If you're looking for a particular one, you're probably best to point your browser, by hand, direct to the RFC. To get RFC1945, for example, use http://sunsite.org.uk/rfc/rfc1945.txt.
  • Ohio State University has a good interface to the RFCs.
  • There's an excellent collection of RFCs in Connected: an Internet Encyclopaedia
  • Another excellent collection at the Zvon RFC repository
• The InterNIC is one of the central coordinating bodies for the internet. Resources there include a directory of InterNIC RFC's, FYI's, etc. (more TLAs?). And an RFC search. See also the InterNIC Directory (a varied collection of directory and database services), which includes the InterNIC White Pages and the InterNIC Directory of Directories.
• The Internet Mail Consortium has a collection of RFCs, by category.
• Almost as authoritative as the RFC series is the Jargon file. There are several versions): the thing has an irritating habit of moving around a lot - the canonical URL seems to be <http://www.ccil.org/jargon/> which currently (January 1999) seems to be a redirect to the link above. Of the various alternative versions mentioned at the main site, the versions by Hans de Wolf and Arjan de Mes seem robust.
• The Free Online Dictionary of Computing (FOLDOC) is similar to the jargon file.
• Given that you are confused now, you might want to have recourse to Connected: an Internet Encyclopedia (UK mirror, IT mirror).
• Also of interest is a fascinating set of remarks about Phase Relationships in the Standardization Process, written by James Gosling, one of the designers of Java. `This is a moderately sarcastic note on the phases that the standardization process goes through, and the relationship between the level of technical and political interest in a topic. It is purely a personal view.'

Well-known RFCs

All of the central standards on the internet have (several) associated RFCs. These include:

About RFCs themselves

RFC 2400: Internet Official Protocol Standards - an RFC about the standards process, RFC 1700: Assigned Numbers.

IP

RFC 791: Internet Protocol, RFC 1519: CIDR.

DNS

RFC 1035: Domain Names - Implementation and Specification, and others.

Web

informational RFC 1945 (HTTP 1.0), RFC 2068 (HTTP 1.1), RFC 1866 (HTML 2.0) RFC 1738 (URLs)

SMTP

RFC 821 (obsoletes RFC 788, which obsoletes RFC 780). Also relevant is RFC 822, Standards for Internet Text Messages (which obsoletes RFC 733).

FTP

RFC 959 (one of a long list of FTP standards

POP

RFC 1939 (includes APOP), which obsoletes RFC 1725. (RFC 1957 is an implementation note).

Base64

RFC 3548: The Base16, Base32, and Base64 Data Encodings (this used to be defined as part of RFC 2045, MIME part 1).

MIME

RFC 2045 (part 1), RFC 2046 (part 2), RFC 2047 (part 3), RFC 2048 (part 4) and RFC 2049 (part 5). See also the lists of registered MIME media types. This is at IANA. The canonical URL for these lists is <ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/> (obsoletes RFC 1521 (part 1) and RFC 1522 (part 2)).

IMAP

too many to list, see the IMAP documents list. Ones I've referred to, however, are RFC 1731, `IMAP4 Authentication Mechanisms', RFC 2060, `Internet Message Access Protocol - Version 4rev1' and RFC 2195, `IMAP/POP AUTHorize Extension for Simple Challenge/Respons'.

The standards bodies

The Internet Society (ISOC) is, in some sense, the `secretariat' of the internet, running the standards process, and supporting the IETF.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is part of ISOC, and is the voluntary body which discusses and sets the Internet's standards (RFCs). The relationship with ISOC is described in historical article at ISOC.

InterNIC (the Network Information Center) knows more about the Internet than you thought there was to know. There are many ways of getting the information. Try giving the unix command

whois -h rs.internic.net help

The UK NIC is Nominet, and it is there that requests for names in the .uk domain are made.

Demon have set up a web-based interface to a number of tools such as DNS and whois queries.

The ISI provides a number of Internet Services, including acting as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority IANA and editing the IETF protocols standards and other network documents, as RFC editor.

History

Yahoo, as ever, has a good collection of links on internet history. Specifically, Vinton Cerf, one of the early architects of the internet, has given a rather technical account of The Birth of the ARPANET.

The ISOC have a small collection of internet history documents. Yahoo also has a history section.

Hobbes' Internet Timeline is a collection of internet events since the 1950s. It's also RFC 2235.

Netiquette

There are many sources of advice on how to behave, which generally boil down to `...have a bit of sense'.

• Arlene Rinaldi's netiquette guide.
• There's even an informational RFC, RFC1855 (copy at Imperial College archive).

Miscellaneous Internet technical information

(I can't think of where else to put this stuff...)

IPng - IP, the next generation - is the next version of the IP protocol that underlies the internet. It's intended to address the pressing problem that the internet is running out of IP numbers.

Oliver Crepin-Leblond maintains a list of internet country codes as part of a collection of information on international email accessibility. (this is where it used to be, at least; perhaps ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/mail/country-codes is now its canonical home).

Norman Created: 1 January 2001 Last modified: 4 October 2002