Not ever an RFC, not even an internet draft

nealmcb — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 16:46:38 +0000

"There is a draft RFC available which describes this protocol in detail."

Terminology is pretty important when it comes to IETF documents, and the word "Draft" can lead to confusion.
No, there is no Plan 9 RFC, it doesn't look like there will be one, and there certainly is not an RFC that has advanced to the "Draft Standard" phase. There is not even an "Internet Draft" any more, since it expired. And the Internet Draft that was submitted explicitely stated that

"This document is an Internet-Draft and is NOT offered in accordance with Section 10 of RFC 2026, and the author does not provide the IETF with any rights other than to publish as an Internet-Draft."

I've never seen anything like that - why publish an internet draft that states up front that you aren't playing by the rules and you don't want to procede?

REST for the web is a bit like that

stfn — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 16:53:48 +0000

The design philosophy shares something with the recently popular "REpresentational State Transfer" style of web services. They each chose one unifying metaphor and a minimal interface: either everything is a file and accessed through file system calls, or everything is a resource and accessed through HTTP methods on a URL.

That might be a naive simplification* but other have observed the same:

http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/2001-August/002801.html
http://rest.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?RestArchitectura...

* It's only one aspect of the design and, on the other hand, there's all kinds of caching in the web and URIs if not URLs are meant to form a global namespace that all users share.

LWN: Comments on "A filesystem from Plan 9 space"

Not ever an RFC, not even an internet draft

REST for the web is a bit like that