The IETF is the standards development organisation for the Internet. It was founded in 1986 and makes voluntary standards that are often adopted by network equipment vendors and literally anyone else who uses or develops anything internet related. The IETF does not control the internet, but they produce high quality technical and engineering documents that influence the way people design, use and manage the Internet.

The documentation that they produce can be split into categories, formally known as statuses:

Informational: This specification indicates that the literature contained within the document that you are reading is purely for informative purposes, it should not be seen as a protocol standard, or a recommendation of any kind.

Experimental: This specification indicates that the literature forms part of a research or development effort.

Standards statuses

Proposed Standard (PS): It is the first formal stage, a lot of standards never make it past this status.

Draft Standard: An intermediate stage that will only be found when you look at old standards.

Internet Standard: This is the final stage, when the standard is shown to be of high quality and in a interoperable working condition.

Best Current Practice (BCP): BCPs are used to signify documents related to IETF processes as agreed by the IETF community, in addition to offering common guidelines for policies and operations that should be followed by operators and administrators of the internet.

Historic: This status signifies that a specification has been superseded by a more recent specification or it is considered to be obsolete for some other reason.

Unknown: Most documentation published before RFC 1128 would fall into this category since this framework was not implemented all the way from the beginning.

Examples

OSPF version 2 RFC 2328

OSPF version 3 RFC 5340

Domain names – concepts and facilities RFC 1034

Domain names – implementation and specification RFC 1035