Request for Comments

Request for Comments (RFC) is a series of numbered informational documents and standards widely followed by commercial software and freeware in the Internet and Unix communities since 1969. Few RFCs are standards but all Internet standards are recorded in RFCs.

Description
The RFCs are unusual in that they are floated by technical experts acting on their own initiative and reviewed by the Internet at large, rather than being formally promulgated through an institution such as ANSI. For this reason, they remain known as RFCs even once adopted as standards. Perhaps the single most influential RFC has been, the Internet electronic mail format standard.

The RFC tradition of pragmatic, experience-driven, after-the-fact standard writing done by individuals or small working groups has important advantages over the more formal, committee-driven process typical of ANSI or ISO. The RFCs are remarkable their effectiveness — they have neither the ambiguities that are usually rife in informal specifications, nor the committee-perpetrated misfeatures that often haunt formal standards, and they define a network that has grown to truly worldwide proportions.

"Joke" RFCs
Emblematic of some of these advantages is the existence of a flourishing tradition of "joke" RFCs; usually at least one a year is published, usually on April 1st. Well-known joke examples have included ("ARPAWOCKY", R. Merryman, UCSD; 22 June 1973),  ("Telnet Randomly-Lose Option", Mark R. Crispin; 1 April 1978), and  ("A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers", D. Waitzman, BBN STC; 1 April 1990). The first was a Lewis Carroll pastiche; the second a parody of the TCP/IP documentation style, and the third a deadpan skewering of standards-document legalese, describing protocols for transmitting Internet data packets by carrier pigeon.