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Machine-readable protocol specifications at the IETF 112 hackathon

The IETF 112 hackathon starts today, and Stephen McQuistin and I will be participating to promote our work on adding machine-readable packet format descriptions to IETF standards documents.

Please join us, along with Marc Petit-Huguenin and others, in the Machine-readable documents and their tools group in the hackathon. This is a group of people interesting using automated tools, and formal and semi-formal languages, to improve the way we write network protocol specifications.

The group broadly includes work on formal and semi-structured description techniques (like ABNF, YANG, the TLS presentation language, the Augmented Packet Header Diagram format and the QUIC packet notation), the tools that are used to produce these descriptions (like Computerate Specifying), and tooling that derive meaning from the content of drafts, including using natural language processing techniques.

Our goals during the hackathon are to build community while working to improve the tooling — please come and join us!