Lately i’ve been digging in the RFC archives for my pleasure and im finding that the series itself has no real standard upon which it was built, it is a giant document collection of anything that might be relevant to the Internet.
Some of my favorites from the recent adventure are:
RFC-1855: Really straight-forward specification of Internet rules of kindness, but I find that this document is really too verbose and “standard-like” to be useful to the modern Internet user, especially since most of the newbies are so stupid.
RFC-822: Old government document, but is really a cool into to SMTP. I find it helpful when diagnosing weird things happening in email transactions. The most unfortunate thing about this document is that it hasn’t been obsoleted by a post-DNS document.
RFC-2150: This document says it is for those with limited knowledge of the Internet. Would anyone with limited knowledge of the Internet know how to get this document? The document makes a strong delcaration about the Internet opinion towards ‘The Arts’. Im really suprised that this document isn’t really more prevailant than it is. I love the fact that this document does welcome artists of all varieties to The Network.
Those three are the most interesting that ive read in the past week, but there are about 3000 more to read and try to find good in. I am finding that these documents are really becoming over-complicated, even though they never were meant to be.