At the lowest level, clarity of presentation in RFCs requires consistent capitalization, hyphenation, and spelling of terms, both within a single RFC and across related RFCs. In some cases the rules are provided by English style manuals, but more often they are specific to the Internet field and to RFCs.

This file is a list of common terms the RFC Editor has encountered and the decisions that were made, often at the request of authors or WG chairs.

• 'Acknowledgments' vs. 'Acknowledgements'
  • If consistent (with or without the “e”), leave it.
  • If inconsistent, delete the “e”.

• 'ASCII' (not 'US-ASCII')

• 'Autonomous System (AS)': plural is 'Autonomous Systems (ASes)'

• 'demultiplexer' (not 'demultiplexor')
  • Note: Consistent with RFC titles except RFC 4594

• 'email' (not 'e-mail' or 'Email' or 'E-mail', etc.)
  • as it appears in media type registration template:
    “Person & email address to contact for further information:”

• 'I-D' (not 'ID') - long-standing abbreviation (see RFC 4677)
  • I-D - with hyphen
  • Internet-Draft - with hyphen

• Internet (capitalized when referring to the global IP-based Internet)

• 'IPsec' (not 'IPSEC' or 'IPSec', etc.)

• 'online' (not 'on-line' -- no space or hyphen)

• 'pseudowire' (no space or hyphen)
  • See RFCs 4385, 4618, 4619, and 4447.)