| Internet-Draft | Making RFC and Internet-Draft Boilerplat | July 2025 |
| Thomson & Schinazi | Expires 29 January 2026 | [Page] |
This document establishes a new policy for RFCs and Internet-Drafts that moves all the fluff (copyright notices and that sort of thing) to the bottom of documents.¶
This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.¶
The latest revision of this draft can be found at https://martinthomson.github.io/bottom-fluff/draft-thomson-rswg-bottom-fluff.html. Status information for this document may be found at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-thomson-rswg-bottom-fluff/.¶
Discussion of this document takes place on the RFC Series Working Group Editorial Stream Working Group mailing list (mailto:rswg@rfc-editor.org), which is archived at https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/rswg/.¶
Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at https://github.com/martinthomson/bottom-fluff.¶
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.¶
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.¶
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."¶
This Internet-Draft will expire on 29 January 2026.¶
Copyright (c) 2025 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.¶
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document.¶
No one reads the legal shrink wrap. All we do by forcing it under their noses is annoy them and waste their time.¶
The IETF can better serve its audience by moving boilerplate in RFCs and Internet-Drafts to the bottom of documents. This ensures that notices exist, but are minimally annoying.¶
In the beginning, there was no fluff (e.g., [RFC0768]). When fluff first started, the "status of this memo" section mainly served as an abstract (e.g., [RFC0959]). Later, its substantive contents were moved down to an "abstract" section (e.g., [RFC1601]). Eventually, someone noticed that having the fluff before the abstract was unhelpful, so the abstract was placed first (e.g., [RFC5545]). We are now following a long tradition of moving the fluff further and further down in the document.¶
The obvious argument is that placement of notices is a security feature. However, given the wide acceptance of the fact that security by obscurity is not an adequate defense, the use of obscurity to improve usability equally cannot be expected to degrade security.¶
This document has no IANA actions.¶
The Internet Protocol Mercenary Company (IPMC) are acknowledged for continuing their ongoing defense of the intellectual property in RFCs.¶