Tuesday, May 09, 2006

XDR is now a full Standard!

Why am I using fixed width font? Because today the RFC editor published RFC 4506, the specification for XDR, and it is only fitting to use IETF's preferred character spacing to note this event. XDR is the data encoding standard for ONC RPC and NFS.

This is the culmination of a long process that started when RFC 1014, an informational RFC for XDR, was published in 1987. For me, the process started in 1997, when Bill Janssen and I submitted implementation reports showing that XDR qualified as a Draft Standard.

New IETF full Standards are rare beasts these days. RFC 4506 is assigned Standard number 67. Standard number 66 - RFC 3986 - was published January of last year.

Thanks to Bob Lyon for inventing XDR. And thanks to
Kevin Coffman, Benny Halevy, Jon Peterson, Peter Astrand and Bryan Olson for helping to cross the Ts and dot the Is on the final document.