From: Tony Finch <dot@dotat.at>
To: ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com>
Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] RFC formatting
Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2019 14:21:16 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.20.1910081346550.9957@grey.csi.cam.ac.uk> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAP6exYJYC0ALa6cV7krft_5mb5_UG1NFU1UGphXrFKKXG_eM2A@mail.gmail.com>
ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
> "why is the formatting so weird" someone asked me.
>
> I am guessing, looking at RFC 1, that it was formatted with an
> ancestor of runoff but ... anyone?
This is really a question for the Internet History list, I think
http://www.postel.org/internet-history/
I don't know how things were done in the 1970s, except that the NIC used
Englebart's NLS. I get the impression that the earliest RFCs were
formatted using the facilities at the author's home institution; I don't
know about the mechanics of duplication and distribution, but it relied on
paper mail for some years until the NIC spun up an FTP server, e.g.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc95
For a very long time, RFCs and drafts were produced using nroff. You can
see some of the remnants of that here:
https://www.rfc-editor.org/pubprocess/tools/
For about 20 years there has been an XML source format for RFCs
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2629
But in the final stages the RFC Editor would convert to nroff to produce
the final published form.
They have just this week switched to a toolchain based on v3 of the
xml2rfc source format. I believe they aren't using nroff for the text
format any more, the publishing tool produces it directly.
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/rfc-interest/jemoHh4imSYkX_Oo2FvMyt_7ZYg
Tony.
--
f.anthony.n.finch <dot@dotat.at> http://dotat.at/
defend the right to speak, write, worship, associate, and vote freely
prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-10-08 13:40 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 2+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-10-04 22:41 ron minnich
2019-10-08 13:21 ` Tony Finch [this message]
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