Becoming an RFC
A draft protocol is a nice thing to have, but it isn't a standard. A large goal of this
project is to see HashBack published as a proper IETF RFC, with the HashBack scheme
listed in IANA's HTTP Authentication Scheme registry alongside Basic, Bearer and
Digest. That's the point at which it stops being "a thing Bill wrote" and starts being
something any library or browser could recognize by name.
Read the draft
There's already a starting point: an early Internet-Draft, written in the IETF's own
xml2rfc format. It's ported from the protocol description in the main README, but it
is genuinely a first draft - unsubmitted, unreviewed by anyone who's actually done this
before, and not yet adopted by any working group.
The XML source, along with notes on rendering it yourself, is in the
rfc folder of this project.
🦔 Hashbert says: “Writing the protocol was the easy part. Writing it the way the IETF wants it written is a different kind of spiky.”
Can you help?
Specifically, I'm looking for anyone who's been through the RFC editing process before - someone who can look at the Security Considerations and IANA Considerations sections with an experienced eye before this goes anywhere near a real submission, and who can tell me what I've got structurally wrong before I find out the hard way from the IETF itself.
If that's you, the project's GitHub is the place to start a conversation.
🦔 Hashbert says: “Every standard was once somebody's draft. I'd just rather not make all the mistakes myself.”