RFC-Specific Terms

At the lowest level, clarity of presentation in RFCs requires consistent capitalization, hyphenation, and spelling of terms, both within a single RFC and across related RFCs. In some cases, the rules are provided by English style manuals, but more often they are specific to the Internet field and to RFCs.

The list highlights terms that were frequently inconsistent and the decisions the RFC Production made regarding consistency, often after discussion with authors and/or working group chairs.

Term	Notes
Acknowledgments and Acknowledgements	If consistent (with or without the “e”), leave it. If inconsistent, delete the “e”.
ASCII	Not 'US-ASCII'
Autonomous System (AS)	Plural is 'Autonomous Systems (ASes)'
demultiplexer	As used in recent RFCs (not 'demultiplexor')
Diffserv	Consistent with RFC titles except RFC 4594 (not 'DiffServ')
email	Per common use and as primary entry in various dictionaries (not 'e-mail' or 'Email' or 'E-mail', etc.)
I-D	Long-standing abbreviation (see RFC 4677) I-D and Internet-Draft - with hyphen (not 'ID')
Internet	Capitalized when referring to the global IP-based Internet
IPsec	Not 'IPSEC' or 'IPSec'
multihomed and multihoming	Per more common use in RFCs (multi-homed or multi-homing)
online	No space or hyphen (not 'on-line')
pseudowire	No space or hyphen (see RFCs 4385, 4618, 4619, and 4447) Google shows this to be the most common usage. Exception: quoted titles of previously published documents.
public key	No hyphen in attributive position; consistent with PKIX documents and RFC 4253
subdomain	No hyphen
suboptions	No hyphen, except with referring to IANA registries, where used with a hyphen.
TEXTUAL-CONVENTION	Within ASN.1 of a MIB, 'TEXTUAL-CONVENTION' is used. However, in general text, it is more correct to use 'Textual Convention'. For example, see RFCs 3811, 3812, 3813, 3814, and 3815
timestamp	More frequent in RFCs 4000+ (not 'time-stamp')

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