| Internet-Draft | Format Framework | August 2022 |
| Hoffman | Expires 10 February 2023 | [Page] |
RFC 7990 "serves as the framework that provides the problem statement, lays out a road map of the documents that capture the specific requirements, and describes the transition plan" for the format of RFCs. The eventual implementation of the framework happened somewhat differently than was described in RFC 7990. This document describes how the framework was, and is being, implemented.¶
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[RFC7990], published in December 2016, defined a framework for how RFCs would be published in the future, including new formats and a new canonical format for archiving RFCs. The first RFC to be published using the framework was [RFC8651], published in October 2019. In the time since then, the new framework has been applied to all published RFCs.¶
The implementation of the framework did not go completely as planned. The canonical format changed many times between the publication of [RFC7991] and now, and is expected to change more times in the future. Similarly, the software used to generate the non-canonical HTML, plain text, and PDF formats also changed during that time.¶
This document describes how the RFC format framework was actually implemented.¶
The RFC Editor has changed the XML v3 vocabulary used to generate RFCs many times since the publication of [RFC7991]. The XML grammars used are currently cataloged at https://github.com/rfc-format/v3grammar. [[ It would probably be good to move that list and all of the files to rfc-editor.org ]] This means that different RFCs were published using different XML grammar. In every case so far, the newer grammar has been a superset of the previous grammar so that all of the RFCs published earlier would be valid in the newest grammar.¶
The current vocabulary is published as https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-irse-draft-irse-xml2rfcv3-implemented/. [[ It would probably be good to move that document to rfc-editor.org ]]¶
The rendering of the non-canonical formats evolved after the initial implementation of the framework. Thus, accessing the files for the non-canonical formats would get different results over time. The rendering is expected to continue to change in the future.¶
This document has no IANA considerations.¶
This document introduces no new security considerations.¶