[rfc-i] I need your "good" RFCs

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 12-Feb-21 13:22, Christian Huitema wrote:
> 
> On 2/11/2021 1:50 PM, Wes Hardaker wrote:
>> Good folks,
>>
>> I'm looking for people's favorite RFCs with respect to readability and
>> understand-ability.  Do you have ones that have always impressed you as
>> your favorites as how RFCs should be written to make their protocol/etc
>> easily understood?  If so, send a note my way (ideally using this
>> subject line).  I don't necessarily think you need to do a reply-all.
>>
>> [And yes, I recognize that this is a subjective ask, and everyone will
>> have a different opinion as to "what is readable" and "what is
>> understandable".  That's ok -- I'm asking for opinions and not facts].
> 
> Wes,
> 
> That's a bit what I was trying to do in RFC 8963. Using citation counts 
> and web search referrals as a proxy for "RFC that appeal to a wide 
> audience". Out of the 60 RFC listed in 3 sets of 20 samples for 1998, 
> 2008, and 2018, the 4 RFC with more than 100 references were:
> 
> RFC 2267 - Network Ingress Filtering: Defeating Denial of Service 
> Attacks which employ IP Source Address Spoofing
> RFC 8446 - The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol Version 1.3
> RFC 5326 - Licklider Transmission Protocol - Specification
> RFC 2404 - The Use of HMAC-SHA-1-96 within ESP and AH
> 
> Clearly, out of about 9000 RFC, many more would meet the criteria. But 
> there has to be something good about these 4.

If you want to take a wider view, perhaps citations as counted by (e.g.)
Google Scholar might be interesting. I'm not sure I have enough Google fu
to do that (except for my own RFCs, which is a biased sample, but
the numbers range from 675 to 0).

But of course citation != approval. The 675 citations are for RFC 3056,
which describes a mechanism deeply hated by many ISPs.

   Brian