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Internet RFC Series Turn 50 (circleid.com)
An anonymous reader writes: This week marks the 50th anniversary for the Internet "Request for Comments" (RFC) series, which started in April 1969 with the publication of RFC1 titled "Host Software" authored by Stephen D. Crocker. The early RFCs were meant to be requests for comments on ideas and proposals, says Heather Flanagan, RFC Series Editor. Today over 8500 RFCs have been published, ranging from best practice information, experimental protocols, informational material, to Internet standards. An RFC has been published to mark the fiftieth anniversary to include retrospective material from individuals involved at key inflection points, as well as a review of the current state of affairs.
> It's just a WORD like any other, it's not an acronym.
You almost figured out why. In an RFC, putting a word in all caps means it's NOT "just a word like any other", the dictionary definition does NOT apply. All caps means "this term is being used to mean something specific which is defined elsewhere in an RFC".
For example, you said:
Why would a WORD like host need to be capitalized?
In an RFC, "a word" means what it means anywhere else. "Cow" and "print" are words.
However, "a WORD" might mean a data item with the same number of bits as the machine's data bus. On a 32-bit machine, a WORD is 32 bits.
In a RFC about a text-based protocol, a WORD might be defined as "a sequence of one or more printable non-whitespace UTF characters". In which case "printk" would be a WORD, as would "starttls".
All caps means "we have a specific definition for this term, and we're using the term in that specific sense here".
Perhaps the most frequently used all-caps terms in RFCs are SHOULD, MUST, and MAY. Specifically, MAY and may need to be disambiguated. "May have security vulnerabilities" means vulnerabilities might exist. "MAY have security vulnerabilities" means it's ALLOWED to be vulnerable - it's specifically okay to do anything marked MAY. (In this instance perhaps any security weaknesses in that part of the algorithm don't matter because it's taken care of when the chunk is encrypted at a higher level).