WSDB: Examples and Notes

Examples

• If you search for "opsec", you will see documents whose title and/or authors contain "opsec" (case-insensitive).
• If you search for "Kumari", you will see documents whose title and/or authors contain "kumari" (case-insensitive).
• If the keywords field is empty, you will see all documents listed in the RFC, IEN and ID index files. (approx. 13MB in HTML)

Notes on Search Results

• When the order of documents is "Newer to Older",
  • Left arrow (←) means "Its left document obsoletes its right document." or
  • Left arrow (←) means "Its left document replaces its right document."
• When the order of documents is "Older to Newer",
  • Right arrow (→) means "Its left document is obsoleted by its right document." or
  • Right arrow (→) means "Its left document is replaced by its right document."
• At the tail of each line, the title and the authors of the latest document in the line are shown.
• When a mouse cursor hovers on an anchor of a document name (except names in the Also / Updated by / Updates brackets) for seconds, its title and authors will be shown in a tooltip.
• If a document (or documents) at the head of a line is the same with one(s) at the head of its previous line, it is shown as a plain text rather than an anchor for the sake of simplicity.
• Notice that, if you search for "RFC1", the keyword matches "RFC1", "RFC1x", "RFC1xx", "RFC1xxx", and so on.
• The following abbreviations are used to indicate the RFC statuses.
  • [S] for "Internet Standard"
  • [DS] for "Draft Standard"
  • [PS] for "Proposed Standard"
  • [BCP] for "Best Current Practice"
  • [E] for "Experimental"
  • [I] for "Informational"
  • [H] for "Historic"
• Search results are assembled from the information in the following index files.
  • https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc-index.txt ∼ “RFC INDEX”
  • https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/ien/ien-index.txt ∼ “Internet Experiment Note Index”
  • https://www.ietf.org/id/all_id2.txt ∼ “Index of all Internet-Drafts”

Another Examples

The following examples are inspired by the discussion on "Getting the latest version of an RFC specification" during IETF 98 Chicago in March, 2017.

• Case 0: RFC 821 "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol" by J. Postel
  • If you search for "RFC821", you will find that RFC821 is updated by RFC2821, which is updated by RFC5321.
    You will also find that the latest document RFC5321 is updated by RFC7504 and updates RFC1123.
  • If you search further for the latest document "RFC5321", you can see more information.
• Case 1: RFC 822 "STANDARD FOR THE FORMAT OF ARPA INTERNET TEXT MESSAGES" by D. Crocker.
  • If you search for "RFC822", the first line of the search result tells you that RFC822 is obsoleted by RFC2822, which is obsoleted by RFC5322.
    It also tells you that RFC822 is updated by five RFCs, RFC2822 is updated by two RFCs and RFC5322 is updated by one RFC.
  • The second line and later list RFCs that update RFC822 as well as some documents related to RFC822.
  • If you search further for the latest document "RFC5322", you can see more information.
• Case 2: RFC 4306 "Internet Key Exchange (IKEv2) Protocol" by C. Kaufman (Ed.)
  • If you search for "RFC4306", you will find that RFC4306 is obsoleted by RFC5996, which is obsoleted by RFC7296.
    You will also find that RFC4306 obsoletes three RFCs (RFC2407, RFC2408, RFC2409).
  • If you search further for the latest document "RFC7296", you can see more information.
    You can also find that RFC5996 obsoletes RFC4718 in addition to RFC4306.
• Case 3: RFC 2616 "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1" by R. Fielding, J. Gettys, J. Mogul, H. Frystyk, L. Masinter, P. Leach, T. Berners-Lee
  • If you search for "RFC2616", you will find that RFC2616 is obsoleted by six RFCs (RFC7230, RFC7231, RFC7232, RFC7233, RFC7234, RFC7235).
    You will also find that RFC2616 is updated by four RFCs (RFC2817, RFC5785, RFC6266, RFC6585).
    RFC2817 is updated by RFC7230 and RFC2732, but the relation between RFC5785, RFC6266, RFC6585 and RFC723[0-5] is not clear in the search result.
  • If you search further for the latest documents "RFC7230 RFC7231 RFC7232 RFC7233 RFC7234 RFC7235" in the OR mode, you can see more information.
• Case 4: RFC 1738 "Uniform Resource Locators (URL)" by T. Berners-Lee, L. Masinter, M. McCahill
  • If you search for "RFC1738", you will find that RFC1738 is obsoleted by two RFCs (RFC4266, RFC4248).
    You will also fint that RFC1738 is updated by seven RFCs (RFC1808, RFC2368, RFC2396, RFC3986, RFC6196, RFC6270, RFC8089).
  • If you search further for the latest documents "RFC4266 RFC4248" in the OR mode, you can see more information on them, but unexpectedly you cannot see enough information on RFC1738 in the search result.
  • If you search for all documents that update or obsolete RFC1738, i.e., "RFC1738 RFC1808 RFC2368 RFC2396 RFC3986 RFC4266 RFC4248 RFC6196 RFC6270 RFC8089" in the OR mode, you can see a bit more (or too much) information on RFC1738.