IESG Statement on Assignable Codepoints for Examples in IETF Specifications

IESG Secretary <iesg-secretary@ietf.org> Thu, 23 October 2025 17:42 UTC

MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
From: IESG Secretary <iesg-secretary@ietf.org>
To: IETF Announcement List <ietf-announce@ietf.org>
Subject: IESG Statement on Assignable Codepoints for Examples in IETF Specifications
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated
Precedence: bulk
Message-ID: <176124135265.330611.5037996948882383595@dt-datatracker-675c8fd764-bsflw>
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2025 10:42:32 -0700
Message-ID-Hash: ICLZDKVNOR3DZOSD4QELPFDABAZPEBUC
CC: iesg@ietf.org
Reply-To: iesg@ietf.org
Archived-At: <https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf-announce/fRKYfhepHbCV2N8W00p31wy7enE>

The IESG has issued a Statement on Assignable Codepoints for Examples in IETF Specifications.

23 October 2025

Protocol specifications and other documents intended for RFC publication may include examples with correctly formatted and syntactically valid codepoints to illustrate the use of a given functionality.

Examples of codepoints are email addresses, domain names, IP addresses, or port numbers. Codepoint values may already have been assigned or may become assigned in the future to entities on the Internet.

To explicitly distinguish between codepoint assignments that could be used in production and those solely for examples in documentation (and not production use), the IETF has reserved values for documentation purposes and usually recorded them in a relevant IANA registry. This practice reduces the impact or associated confusion if codepoints allocated for documentation leak into production use.

Read the full statement: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/statement-iesg-statement-on-assignable-codepoints-for-examples-in-ietf-specifications/

IESG Statement on Assignable Codepoints for Examp… IESG Secretary