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Comment by pierreneter | Hacker News Reader

It has been standardized as RFC 8478 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8478) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Parameters (https://www.iana.org/assignments/http-parameters/http-parame...) with name: zstd

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"Despite use of the word "standard" as part of its name, readers are advised that this document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is being published for informational purposes only."

So, there's an RFC, but it is not standardized, per se. But close enough, for many uses.

For an algorithm with "standard" in its name.

This gets more confusing my the minute.

It was intended to replace zlib/DEFLATE as the de facto standard of casual compression algorithms, so it makes some sense.

It's as standard as most file formats get. The IETF reserves the phrase "Internet Standard" for certain very important protocols -- there's no place in the process for file formats.

The IETF has a Standards process, which develops new de jure standards and this just isn't one of those. Most products of the IETFs dozens of working groups (e.g. the replacement effort for CAT is being worked on by a group named kitten) will be Standards Track documents.

IETF working groups are perfectly capable of defining file formats, eg RFC 7468.

ZStandard wasn't developed using the IETF process, that's why it isn't on the IETF Standards Track. PNG likewise is not on the Standards track, whereas Ogg (the container format) is.

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