Standards & References Library
132 specifications and references cited across this site's tools and categories, organized by the body that publishes them.
Every entry below is a citation already used somewhere on this site — inside a tool's Technical Reference Guide or a category's standards landscape section — not a new list assembled separately from what the tools actually implement. This page exists so those citations are also browsable in one place, grouped by standards body, rather than only reachable one tool at a time.
See How Calculations Work for how these specifications are actually applied, and Editorial Policy for how citations are reviewed.
RFC / IETF
Internet Engineering Task Force Requests for Comments — the primary specifications governing internet protocols, data formats, and cryptographic constructions used across this site.
- IANA HTTP Status Code Registry
- IANA Media Types Directory
- IANA Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry
- IANA TLS Cipher Suites Registry
- RFC 1035 — Domain Names: Implementation and Specification
- RFC 1321: The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm Specification
- RFC 1518 — An Architecture for IP Address Allocation with CIDR
- RFC 1918 — Address Allocation for Private Internets
- RFC 20 — ASCII Format for Network Interchange
- RFC 2045: MIME Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies
- RFC 2104: HMAC: Keyed-Hashing for Message Authentication
- RFC 2781 — UTF-16, an Encoding of ISO 10646
- RFC 2985 — PKCS #9: Selected Object Classes and Attribute Types
- RFC 2986 — PKCS #10: Certification Request Syntax Specification
- RFC 3596 — DNS Extensions to Support IP Version 6
- RFC 3629 — UTF-8, a Transformation Format of ISO 10646
- RFC 3912 — WHOIS Protocol Specification
- RFC 3986 — Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax
- RFC 4122: Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) URN Namespace
- RFC 4180 Common Format for CSV Files
- RFC 4251 — The Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol Architecture
- RFC 4253 — The Secure Shell (SSH) Transport Layer Protocol
- RFC 4271 — A Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4)
- RFC 4291 — IP Version 6 Addressing Architecture
- RFC 4632 — Classless Inter-domain Routing (CIDR)
- RFC 4648 — The Base16, Base32, and Base64 Data Encodings
- RFC 5280: Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Certificate Profile
- RFC 5952 — A Recommendation for IPv6 Address Text Representation
- RFC 5958 — Asymmetric Key Packages (PKCS #8)
- RFC 6066 — Transport Layer Security (TLS) Extensions (Server Name Indication)
- RFC 6125 — Representation and Verification of Domain-Based Application Service Identity
- RFC 6238 — TOTP: Time-Based One-Time Password Algorithm
- RFC 6335 — IANA Procedures for Port Number Registration
- RFC 6793 — BGP Support for Four-Octet AS Number Space
- RFC 6797 — HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS)
- RFC 6962 — Certificate Transparency
- RFC 7231: HTTP/1.1 Semantics and Content
- RFC 7468: Textual Encapsulations of PKIX, PKCS, and CMS Structures
- RFC 7482 — Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) Query Format
- RFC 7515 — JSON Web Signature (JWS)
- RFC 7517 — JSON Web Key (JWK)
- RFC 7518 — JSON Web Algorithms (JWA)
- RFC 7519 — JSON Web Token (JWT)
- RFC 8017 — PKCS #1: RSA Cryptography Specifications Version 2.2
- RFC 8259 — The JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Data Interchange Format
- RFC 8446 — The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol Version 1.3
- RFC 8555 — Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME)
- RFC 8709 — Ed25519 and Ed448 Public Key Algorithms for the Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol
- RFC 9110 — HTTP Semantics
- RFC 9110: HTTP Semantics
- RFC 9162 — Certificate Transparency Version 2.0
- RFC 950 — Internet Standard Subnetting Procedure
NIST / FIPS
U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology publications and Federal Information Processing Standards for cryptographic algorithms and key management.
W3C
World Wide Web Consortium recommendations for web platform APIs and document formats.
WHATWG
Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group living standards for URL, Fetch, and related web-platform behavior.
Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Standard and its technical annexes governing character encoding, normalization, and text representation.
ISO
International Organization for Standardization specifications for data interchange formats.
OpenAPI Initiative
The OpenAPI Specification governing REST API contract description.
GraphQL Foundation
The GraphQL Specification governing query language and schema behavior.
OWASP
Open Web Application Security Project cheat sheets — practical, community-vetted security guidance that supplements formal standards.
ECMA International
Ecma International standards for scripting languages and data-interchange formats.
Other References & Implementation Guides
Vendor documentation, de-facto specifications, and implementation references that are not formal international standards but are the authoritative source for a given format or tool.
- Adobe PostScript Language Reference Manual (Ascii85 encoding)
- ANSI SQL-92 Standard Reference Wiki
- Binary and Hexadecimal conversions MDN Guide
- BIP32: Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets
- BIP39: Mnemonic code for generating deterministic keys
- Bitcoin Base58Check Encoding (Bitcoin Developer Reference)
- CommonMark Specification
- Compose Specification
- Crockford's Base32 Encoding Standard Reference
- Crontab.guru: Interactive Cron Editor
- Docker Compose Specification Standard
- Git Documentation — gitignore
- GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM)
- GitHub Flavored Markdown Spec — Tables (extension)
- GitHub's community-maintained .gitignore templates collection
- HTML Tidy Library Guide
- ICAO Annex 10, Volume II — Aeronautical Telecommunications (Communication Procedures)
- IEEE 754 Floating-Point Standard Reference
- Information Theory & Entropy on Wikipedia
- JSON Official Specification Website
- JSON Schema Specification (2020-12)
- JSON Schema Validation Specification (2020-12)
- MDN Web Docs Base64 Encoding
- MDN Web Docs CSS Guide
- MDN Web Docs encodeURIComponent
- MDN Web Docs JavaScript Guide
- MDN Web Docs Regular Expressions Guide
- MDN Web Docs String manipulation Guide
- MDN Web Docs: Common MIME Types
- MDN Web Docs: HTML Character Entities
- MDN Web Docs: HTTP Response Status Codes
- MDN Web Docs: URL API Reference
- MDN Web Docs: User-Agent Header
- MDN Web Docs: XML Overview
- Nano ID GitHub Source Repository Reference
- POSIX crontab Specification Standard
- PostgreSQL Documentation — SQL Syntax (Comments)
- PostgreSQL Documentation SELECT Reference
- Reed-Solomon Error Correction Wiki
- RegExr: Learning and Testing Tool
- Standard Case Style Nomenclature Wiki
- TOML Language Overview
- TOML Specification
- ULID Specification Github Repository Reference
- Unix Time Wikipedia Reference
- USENIX Bcrypt Hashing Paper Reference
- YAML 1.2 Specification Standard Reference
- YAML Specification
- YAML vs JSON (Comparison)
Current structure: 102 tools · 10 categories · 14 developer hubs · 26 comparisons. Site last built July 26, 2026 (UTC).