[crispyambulance]

I'll never understand why rfc's, arguably the underpinnings of internet technology, are styled to appear as TYPEWRITTEN pages in HTML. Seriously. Literal pages of typewritten text, on the web.

I mean, they take significant effort to devise these standards and write them up, presumably with modern tools, AND THEN force weird typewriter CSS upon them? It looks awful. I can't understand it.

[bonyt]

I assume this is because they’re published as plain text files. The HTML is styled to look the same as the plain text versions, including diagrams made assuming a fixed-width font.

https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc793.txt

Plain ASCII text is a very compatible format, and probably will be for a very long time. For example, if you were to pipe this to a TCP socket on modern printer on port 9100 unchanged, it’ll likely print out roughly correct.

[crispyambulance]

OK, I see, but they provide three different formats: ASCII, PDF, and HTML.

If there's a zombie apocalypse and we end up raiding the computer history museum for 80 column line-printers, sure, it makes sense to select the ASCII version to make print outs so that we could rebuild the internet.

But for the HTML version? Come on! Freshen it up a bit.

[ComodoHacker]

This low-tech format ensures the specs remain readable and unambiguous.

Imagine you've lost most of web technology after a nuclear apocalypse or something and have to recreate it from specs. You have no software guaranteed to render HTML correctly and completely. (We don't have it even now BTW.) It's like bootstrapping a compiler toolchain on an entirely new architecture. You have to start with assembly, and it looks awful.