I remember the first time I opened an IETF draft. It looked like a dinosaur had vomited on a LaTeX document. My eyes glazed over. I thought, This is why normal people don’t contribute to internet standards. But then I found something that changed everything.
It’s a humble Markdown file on GitHub. Yes, a Markdown file. And it’s the most powerful tool for shaping the internet you’ve never heard of.
The internet was never meant to be a closed club of gatekeepers. It was built by people who wrote down their ideas in plain text.
This is the Kramdown-RFC template. It turns the arcane, XML‑wrapped, 800‑page IETF draft process into something any developer can handle in an afternoon. No more wrestling with nroff or XML2RFC. Just write, commit, and submit.
You’ve probably felt the frustration. You had a brilliant idea for a new protocol—something that would fix a real pain point in your daily work. But then you looked at the IETF contribution guide and your soul left your body. The barrier wasn’t technical genius. It was a documentation nightmare.
That’s the real bottleneck in internet standardization. Not the complexity of the technology. Not the lack of smart people. The friction of the authoring process. And one developer decided to fix it.
Douglas Crockford—the same guy who brought us JSON—released an example Internet‑Draft written in Kramdown‑RFC. It’s for a human‑readable Base32 encoding. But the real story isn’t the encoding. It’s the format.
He proved that anyone with a text editor and a sensible idea can now propose a change to the foundational protocols of the internet. That’s not hyperbole. That’s engineering democracy.
Let’s be honest: the IETF’s current toolchain is a relic of the 1990s. It’s time to burn it down and replace it with something that any developer can use. The Kramdown‑RFC approach is that replacement. It’s Markdown with a few extra rules. It’s readable. It’s version‑controlled. It’s what we should have been using all along.
You think you need a PhD in networking to propose a new protocol? Look at this example: Crockford’s Base32. It’s a human‑readable encoding standard written by a guy who wanted to make numbers easier to read. That’s it. That’s the whole story. He was annoyed by something, wrote a draft, and now it’s an RFC.
I asked a friend at the IETF: “Why is this so hard?” He said, “Because it’s always been this way.” That’s the mindset that kept innovation out. The Kramdown‑RFC template is the antidote to “because it’s always been this way.”
The best ideas don’t come from committees—they come from individuals who are annoyed enough to write a draft.
So go ahead. Fork the repo. Write your draft. The internet is waiting for your idea. And if you’re wrong? The revision process will sort it out. That’s the beauty of open standards—they’re not perfect, they’re iterated.
Stop waiting for permission. The next great protocol is just a Markdown file away.
FAQ
Q: What is the actual difference between Kramdown-RFC and the traditional IETF toolchain?
A: Traditional IETF drafts require formatting in XML or nroff with strict validation. Kramdown-RFC is a Markdown extension that compiles to the same RFC XML format, but you write in plain text with minimal markup. It drastically reduces friction for developers who already use Markdown for documentation.
Q: Does this mean I can submit a random idea and it will become a standard?
A: No. The template lowers the barrier to entry, but the IETF still has a review process, working groups, and consensus-building. The key is that you can now create a well-formed draft without spending weeks learning arcane tools. The idea still needs to be technically sound and gain community support.
Q: Isn't this just a niche tool for a tiny community? Will it actually change anything?
A: Niche tools have changed the internet before—JSON, REST, and Markdown itself started as small experiments. The real impact is psychological: when developers see that writing an RFC is as easy as writing a README, they're more likely to contribute. Over time, this could flood the IETF with fresh, practical ideas from people who actually build the internet.