[Anon1096]

The people building the infrastructure powering the internet at cloudflare, major cloud providers, isps, etc are all regularly reading and referencing RFCs (from experience). People who aren't reading them now weren't reading them in the past either, we don't need some RFC moral panic.

[Demiurge]

I agree. RFCs have a niche use case, like a manual, or a glossary. They're there, if you need them, but few people are supposed to be implementing RFCs or internet from "blueprints" all the time.

[onraglanroad]

I don't think they're that niche. If you want to know what an email address can contain or what a cname should be, just read the RFC.

They're surprisingly easy to read and I'd encourage any younger readers to have a look at ones that are appropriate to your field. You'll almost certainly learn something new and it's good to have a grasp of these fundamentals.

[vlovich123]

Which RFC? The challenge as with all technical specifications is that you have revisions over time and even some times get split up into multiple RFCs. And then as with all interoper issues, is the RFC that you implement the one that other systems you’re interacting with also implementing that RFC. And then even after all of that, you have implementation differences where even if you follow the RFC to the letter, other implementations either made intentional alternate legal choices or had bugs.

RFCs are generally easy to read but there’s a meaningful chasm between understanding the RFC and what actually gets implemented in practice.

[1718627440]

Use a web search. And in a lot of RFC websites, you get cross-references if a document got superseded by another. Wikipedia also tells you that.