The canonical format for the RFC Series has been plain-text, ASCII- encoded for several decades. After extensive community discussion and debate, the RFC Editor will be transitioning to XML as the canonical format using the XML2RFC version 3 vocabulary. Different publication formats will be rendered from that base document. These changes are intended to increase the usability of the RFC Series by offering documents that match the needs of a wider variety of stakeholders. With these changes, however, comes an increase in complexity for authors, consumers, and the publisher of RFCs. This document serves as the framework that describes the problems being solved and summarizes the many documents that capture the specific requirements for each aspect of the change in format.