[TUHS] RFC formatting

[Tony Finch]

ron minnich <rminnich at 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.
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