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Gideon Burton

Op-Ed Contributor - How the Internet Got Its Rules - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...07crocker.html

protocols internet history RFC open standards

shared by Gideon Burton on 15 Aug 12 - Cached
  • We thought maybe we’d put together a few temporary, informal memos on network protocols, the rules by which computers exchange information
  • Less important than the content of those first documents was that they were available free of charge and anyone could write one. Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.”
  • Still fearful of sounding presumptuous, I labeled the note a “Request for Comments.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • the R.F.C.’s themselves took root and flourished. They became the formal method of publishing Internet protocol standards
  • Our intent was only to encourage others to chime in, but I worried we might sound as though we were making official decisions or asserting authority.
  • It probably helped that in those days we avoided patents and other restrictions; without any financial incentive to control the protocols, it was much easier to reach agreement.
  • This was the ultimate in openness in technical design and that culture of open processes was essential in enabling the Internet to grow and evolve as spectacularly as it has
  • we always tried to design each new protocol to be both useful in its own right and a building block available to others. We did not think of protocols as finished products, and we deliberately exposed the internal architecture to make it easy for others to gain a foothold.
  • Gideon Burton on 15 Aug 12
     
    Stephen D. Crocker explains the early planning documents ("Requests for Comments") and how they exemplified and made possible the open nature of the web.
Gideon Burton

RFC 1866 - Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0 - 0 views

tools.ietf.org/rfc1866

berners-lee HTML history request for comments RFC

shared by Gideon Burton on 28 Aug 12 - Cached
    • Gideon Burton
      Gideon Burton on 30 Aug 12
       
      This historical document laying out hypertext markup language (HTML) is an example of how an emerging standard was codified. HTML had been around since 1990. Berners-Lee formalized the standard and the process of revising it further through this informal request for comments.
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