Request for Comments
The technical activities of the Internet community are summarized in documents known as Request for Comments or RFCs. Protocol standards, proposed changes, and informational bulletins all usually end up as RFCs. RFCs start their lives as Internet Drafts, and after lots of email wrangling and IETF meetings they either die or are promoted to the RFC series. Anyone who has comments on a draft or proposed RFC is encouraged to reply. In addition to standardizing the Internet protocols, the RFC mechanism sometimes just documents or explains aspects of existing practice.
Once distributed, the contents of an RFC are never changed. Updates are distributed with their own reference numbers.
