Checking whether an IETF draft is actually a standard, from the command line

Someone links an Internet-Draft, calls it a new standard, and now you have to decide whether to build against it. The draft looks official. It has a document number, section headings full of MUST and SHOULD, an IANA Considerations section and a Normative References list. None of that tells you what stage it is at. The IETF publishes the answer as structured data. You can get it in one HTTP request, and the fields you need are all null or not null, so the check fits in a few lines of code. The filename already tells you something Every Internet-Draft name follows a pattern: draft-<who-submitted-it>-<topic>-<revision> If the second segment is ietf , a working group adopted the document and owns it. draft-ietf-dmarc-dmarcbis is the DMARC working group's revision of DMARC. Anything else is the submitter's own name or their employer's. draft-brotman-aggregate-performance-reporting is an individual submission by Alex Brotman. That is a signal and it costs nothing to read. It is not the whole answer, because a document can be adopted later and keep circulating under the old name in people's bookmarks, so the rename matters and you want the current record. One request to the datatracker The IETF datatracker has a read-only REST API at /api/v1/ . No key, no signup. curl -s "https://datatracker.ietf.org/api/v1/doc/document/?name=draft-brotman-aggregate-performance-reporting&format=json" \ | jq '.objects[0] | {name, rev, stream, intended_std_level, ad, shepherd, rfc_number, pages, expires}' Run on 13 September 2026, that returns: { "name" : "draft-brotman-aggregate-performance-reporting" , "rev" : "01" , "stream" : null , "intended_std_level" : null , "ad" : null , "shepherd" : null , "rfc_number" : null , "pages" : 14 , "expires" : "2027-03-12T15:50:05Z" } Five nulls in a row. Now the same query against the DMARC working group document: { "name" : "draft-ietf-dmarc-dmarcbis" , "rev" : "41" , "stream" : "/api/v1/name/streamname/ietf/" , "intended_std_level" : "/api/v1/name/int