New features for RFC-Editor.org

New features implemented on RFC-Editor.org aim to make the site more useful and engaging for RFC consumers.

The new RFC Editor website, launched four months ago, aims to address the needs of RFC consumers with faster, more comprehensive searching of RFCs, updated presentation of RFCs for an improved reading experience, and better site accessibility for people with visual impairments.

Additional features are being launched today to provide more capabilities useful to RFC consumers, enabling new ways to find, organize, and engage with RFCs. Some of the new features require creating an account.

The latest round of improvements are being shared now with the goal of gathering community input. Some features may be updated or altered based on the feedback received.

The long-standing RFC Production Center practice of tagging RFCs with keywords makes it easier to find RFCs related to a particular topic or technology, but some older RFCs lack keywords and the topics have never been applied in an organized manner.  The new subject tags on RFCs aim to help readers find related RFCs in a more structured way. The design principles for the subject tags, the full taxonomy, and the code used to generate them can be found in a dedicated GitHub repository, which includes a separate tag browser that allows you to examine the taxonomy in detail. Issues with the tags can be raised directly in that repository.

Some of the new features on RFC-editor.org require an account at account.ietf.org. For the moment, these accounts are separate from the IETF Datatracker accounts, though there is a plan to merge these in the future. RFC-editor.org readers who do not use Datatracker will not need to take any other actions when that merge occurs.

Logged-in website visitors now have the ability to create and share personal sets of RFCs to organize them within their accounts.