A new suite of modern tools coming for editing and publishing RFCs

After a number of years of work, the initial rollout of a modern suite of tools for editing and publishing RFCs, including an entirely new rfc-editor.org website, will take place in May 2026.

UPDATE 12 May 2026: Launch of the new tools for editing and publishing RFCs originally anticipated for 13 May has been deferred until the week of 18 May.

Since its inception in 1969 with the publication of RFC 1, the RFC Series has had a formal editing and management function that has evolved through multiple iterations, as the series has itself evolved, to the RFC Editor function that we have today. Now with over 9000 documents in the series, RFCs are authored in a variety of tools, often tracked through formal version control, published in RFCXML, and rendered into multiple presentation formats. The role of the RFC Production Center (RPC), the team that delivers the RFC Editor function, has changed significantly as a result.

In recent years it became clear that the tools used by the RPC could not adapt as needed to support these changes. The underlying database was too old, too rigid and too fragile, the editing tools were a large collection of unrelated and hard to maintain scripts, and the rfc-editor.org website was built on a platform far too old to add new functionality and improve usability. In particular, it was clear that the current tools could not support the editing or publication of RFC 10,000 and beyond.

In mid-2022 the IETF Administration LLC began a project to completely rewrite all of the RPC tools and add the new functionality that authors and the community had long been asking for, comprising the following: