There’s a lot of history involved, and a difference between authoring and publication formats. It’s only comparatively recently (2016–2019, can’t remember exact

There’s a lot of history involved, and a difference between authoring and publication formats. It’s only comparatively recently (2016–2019, can’t remember exactly and can’t be bothered looking it up) that they stopped having the canonical form of the published document being monospace plain text with fixed pagination. Now, it’s markup, and so it can readily be presented in quite different ways. Observe this security.txt RFC 9116 formatted in two different ways: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9116 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9116 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9116.html https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9116.html