April 2nd, 2005

April Fool RFCs

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While normal human beings celebrate April Fools by making publishing their transparent desktop picture on national newspaper, geeks publish standards like UTF-9/UTF-18 and Morality requirements for Routing. Look, geeks can be funny too! (ie, if you can understand the joke :-)

Anyway, IETF has a traditional to publish April Fool RFCs and I always watch out for them. But some of the April Fool RFCs are more then jokes. For example, RFC1149, an April RFC publish in 1990 talks about how to use carrier pigeons to carry IP packets. We have a great laugh during one of the IETF in 2001 when someone revealed they actually implemented it. Yes, they put packets into paper, put them on carrier pigeons and send them over! So thanks to that, RFC 1149 is now made a Full Standard :-)

Incidently, the UTF-9/18 joke reminded me of my UTF-5 Internet-Draft publish 5 years ago. No, UTF-5 was not a joke – it is was the proposal that got IDN Working Group started in IETF and also become the foundation of the ACE (ASCII Compatible Encoding) used in current IDN.

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