The TCP/IP Guide  9  Networking Fundamentals       9  Network Standards and Standards Organizations

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RFC Categories

As before, not all RFCs are official Internet standards, which is important to remember. Each RFC has a category or status associated with it that indicates its disposition:

• Proposed Standard / Draft Standard / Standard: These are documents that describe technologies said to be on the “standards track”. That means they are either already formally approved as standards, or they are likely to become standards in the future. In many cases, the document is just given as “Standards Track” as opposed to one of those three precise labels. See below for more information.
  
  
• Best Current Practice: A document providing guideline information or recommendations from the IETF that is not a formal standard.
  
  
• Informational: A document that provides general information or commentary.
  
  
• Experimental: A proposal for an experimental standard that is not on the standards track. In some cases, protocols or proposed changes to existing protocols that are not accepted as formal standards are changed to “experimental” status.
  
  
• Historic: Former standards that have been obsoleted.

Internet Registration Authorities and Registries (IANA, ICANN, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC, RIPE NCC) 1 2 3 Backgrounder: Data Representation and the Mathematics of Computing