Have you noticed that some RFCs are available in HTML and plain text?
Every few months, there is a discussion on the IETF general mailing list about the format of RFCs. The result is almost always the same: we'll continue to publish plain text RFCs, but we'll keep an open mind.
Well, a few years back, Marshall Rose and friends created a tool named xml2rfc that converts a certain XML format into the standard plain text RFC format. In addition, the tool converts the XML to HTML. (There are similar tools that convert from nroff and from Microsoft Word into plain text RFCs, but not HTML.) This made the text-only side happy, and it allowed the plain-text-sucks side to be happy, too.
The problem is, not all RFC authors use the xml2rfc tool, and they continue to create only plain text RFCs. For those of us who prefer to read HTML in a browser instead of plain text in a text editor, it's helpful to know which RFCs are available as HTML, and where to find the HTML version. It turns out that the developers who created xml2rfc wanted the RFCs linked together, so they created a database for RFCs. The xml2rfc tool checks the database to find the link targets for referenced RFCs. You can check that database yourself if you want to see if a particular RFC has an HTML version. You can get the database as a zip file or just visit the directory.
As a side note, there are a lot of RFCs converted to pseudo-HTML, which are available at http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/. These "HTML" RFCs are basically text with <pre> tags around them.
Posted by Doug Sauder at November 12, 2005 09:02 AM