port #?

[Eliot Lear <[e-mail]>]

Hi everyone,

I note that we still haven't cleaned up the connection model
sufficiently.  When someone implements a specification they need to know
at least the port number to connect to. This is the document that has to
specify at least at a bare minimum how that happens.  This can be
handled in at least one of four ways:

1.  We refer to RFC-2616 normatively.  This implies that we will not
obsolete 2616 at this time.  If we do so later we would need to pull the
HTTP URI definition out and update the IANA definition.
2.  We pull the HTTP URI definition out and produce a small document for
it separately and refer to that, updating RFC-2616.
3.  We include the URI definition in the HTTP2 draft.
4.  We abstract the connection model entirely from the document.
5.  We specify that unless specified within a URI, the default protocol
is TCP and the default port is 80.

This all came to light because of interest to do some work with HTTP2
using something other than TCP.  Thus, one might thing that [4] is the
appropriate thing to do, but my experience with BEEP is that it lends
itself to an ugly set of documents and violates the KISS principle.  To
that end, I recommend the text in [5] be added for now, and that as
HTTP2 matures we consider [2] later.

Specifically, OLD:

   The HTTP/2.0 session runs atop TCP ([RFC0793]).  The client is the
   TCP connection initiator.

NEW:

   Unless otherwise specified within a URI, an HTTP/2.0 session runs
   atop TCP ([RFC0793]) and a client initiates a server on port 80. 

Eliot