Who writes this

This site is written by Noel Lang. I am a software developer and IT trainer, and I run ausbildung-in-der-it.de, a German learning platform for people training for IT jobs. Explaining technical documents to people who are new to them is most of what I do, so a site that does exactly that for RFCs felt overdue.

Why this site exists

RFCs are the documents that define how the internet actually works, and most of them are unreadable unless you already know what they say. The prose is dense, the terms are assumed, and the one paragraph you needed is buried on page nine. That is not a failing of the RFCs. They are specifications, written for implementers, not a first introduction.

rfc-explained.com is the on-ramp. Each page takes one RFC and answers the questions a normal person actually has: what problem does it solve, what does it really say, where do I run into it, and what do people get wrong about it. We do not replace the specification. We get you to the point where reading it makes sense.

How each page is made

Every explainer is checked against the original document, not against a summary of a summary. If a page states the status of an RFC, whether it is current, obsoleted, or replaced by a newer one, that comes from the source, because getting the status wrong is the most common and most damaging mistake in RFC write-ups online.

Every page links to the primary source at datatracker.ietf.org, always, at the bottom. That is a deliberate trust signal: you can check us. Nothing here asks you to take an explanation on faith when the authoritative text is one click away. Where an explanation simplifies, it says so rather than pretending the simplification is the whole truth.

Getting in touch

Found an error, disagree with a reading, or want a particular RFC explained next? That kind of message is genuinely welcome, corrections make the site better. Use the contact form.