About

About metasystema

metasystema is an independent reference for the IETF RFC series. It exists to answer one question quickly: you have hit an RFC number in a spec, a header, a log line or a code review — what does it define, is it still current, and what replaced it?

Who maintains it

The site is written and maintained by The metasystema editorial team. Every page here is either machine-imported from the public RFC Editor index or hand-written editorial summary; the sources page says exactly which is which, field by field.

What it is not

• Not affiliated with the IETF, the IRTF, the IAB, the Internet Society or the RFC Editor. Those organisations publish the documents; this site indexes and explains them.
• Not authoritative. The RFC text itself is normative. Summaries here are editorial and can be wrong, out of date, or too simplified for your case. Always check the document before you implement against it.
• Not a mirror. Full RFC text lives at rfc-editor.org and every document page here links straight to it.

How it is built

The document record for each RFC — title, authors, publication date, status, stream, area, obsoletes/updates relationships, DOI and errata — comes verbatim from the RFC Editor index. Plain-English summaries are written by hand for the most-referenced documents; for the rest the page shows the RFC's own abstract, clearly labelled as such. Nothing on this site is generated on the fly to fill space, and no statistic appears here that is not counted directly from the indexed data.

Corrections

If a summary is wrong or a status is stale, please tell us — corrections are the fastest way to make this reference worth trusting. Our approach to writing and fixing pages is set out in the editorial policy.