Requirements for Plain-Text RFCs
RFC 7994, “Requirements for Plain-Text RFCs”, is an Informational document published in December 2016 by H. Flanagan. It has since been updated by RFC 9920. The canonical text is published by the RFC Editor.
Abstract
In 2013, after a great deal of community discussion, the decision was made to shift from the plain-text, ASCII-only canonical format for RFCs to XML as the canonical format with more human-readable formats rendered from that XML. The high-level requirements that informed this change were defined in RFC 6949, "RFC Series Format Requirements and Future Development". Plain text remains an important format for many in the IETF community, and it will be one of the publication formats rendered from the XML. This document outlines the rendering requirements for the plain-text RFC publication format. These requirements do not apply to plain-text RFCs published before the format transition.
What “Informational” means
Published for the general information of the community. It does not define an IETF standard and carries no standards-track status.
The canonical text of RFC 7994 is hosted at rfc-editor.org. Available in TXT,HTML.
- RFC 7993 Cascading Style Sheets Requirements for RFCs
- RFC 7995 PDF Format for RFCs
- RFC 7992 HTML Format for RFCs
- RFC 7996 SVG Drawings for RFCs: SVG 1.2 RFC
- RFC 7991 The "xml2rfc" Version 3 Vocabulary
- RFC 7997 The Use of Non-ASCII Characters in RFCs
- RFC 7990 RFC Format Framework
- RFC 7998 "xml2rfc" Version 3 Preparation Tool Description