Dan Q

Tag: rfcs

You MUST listen to RFC 2119

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With thanks to Ruth for sharing this with me:

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RFC 2119 establishes language around requirement levels. Terms like “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “SHOULD”, and “SHOULD NOT” are helpful when coordinating with engineers. I reference it a lot for work, as I create a lot of accessible component specifications.

Because of this familiarity—and because I’m an ass—I fired back in Discord:

I want to hire a voice actor to read 2119 in the most over the top, passive-aggressive way possible
wait, this is an achievable goal oh no

It turns out you can just pay people to do things.

I found a voice actor and hired them with the task of “Reading this very dry technical document in the most over-the-top sarcastic, passive-aggressive, condescending way possible. Like, if you think it’s too much, take that feeling, ignore it, and crank things up one more notch.”

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RFC 2119 is one of few RFCs I can identify by number alone, too. That and RFCs 1945 and 1866, for some reason, and RFC 2822 (and I guess, by proxy, 822) because I’ve had to implement its shitty date format more times than I’d like to count.

But anyway: if you’ve ever wanted to hear a (sarcastic, passive aggressive) dramatic reading of RFC 2119, Eric – and the actor he found – have got you covered!

Repost posted at UTC on .

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RFC-20

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

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The choice of this encoding has made ASCII-compatible standards the language that computers use to communicate to this day.

Even casual internet users have probably encountered a URL with “%20” in it where there logically ought to be a space character. If we look at this RFC we see this: 

   Column/Row  Symbol      Name

   2/0         SP          Space (Normally Non-Printing)

Hey would you look at that! Column 2, row 0 (2,0; 20!) is what stands for “space”. When you see that “%20”, it’s because of this RFC, which exists because of some bureaucratic decisions made in the 1950s and 1960s.

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Darius Kazemi is reading a single RFC every day throughout 2019 and writing up his understanding as to the content and importance of each. It’s good reading if you’re “into” RFCs and it’s probably pretty interesting if you’re just a casual Internet historian.

Repost posted at UTC on .

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