But this status is sometimes omitted from quotes and references, which may feed the confusion. It is important to note that the relationship of STD numbers to RFC numbers is not one to one. STD numbers identify protocols, RFC numbers identify documents. Sometimes more than one document is used to specify a Standard protocol. The IAB believes that the community benefitted significantly from having a single archival document series.
Documents are easy to find and to retrieve, and file servers are easy to organize.
This has been very important over the long term. Experience of the past shows that subseries, or series of limited scope, tend to vanish from the network. And, there is no evidence that alternate document schemes would result in less confusion. Moreover, we believe that the presence of additional documents does not actually hurt the standardization process. Rather Document Than Ignore The RFC series includes some documents which are informational by nature and other documents which describe experiences.