Re: Reminder: WGLC Announcement for draft-ietf-tsvwg-iana-ports-08 - 26th November 2010

[Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]>]

In general, this document seems fairly worthwhile. I have a two reservations, however:

- There is no justification for retaining the differentiation between System Ports and User Ports. Given the wide disparity in assignment rates, I would have thought that this would be a good time to say "there is no longer a difference". The text in 8.1 doesn't explain the difference in a way I could discern. At a minimum, this needs to be covered in much more detail in sections 7.1 and 7.2.

- Two of the references seem ill-advised for a long-lived RFC:
   [SYSFORM]  Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), "Application
              for System (Well Known) Port Number",
               http://www.iana.org/cgi-bin/sys-port-number.pl.

   [USRFORM]  Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), "Application
              for User (Registered) Port Number",
               http://www.iana.org/cgi-bin/usr-port-number.pl.
For years, URI-aware IETF participants have been trying to get IANA to not instantiate URIs that hard-code the source and type of content in public URLs. The above two URLs force IANA to keep using an Apache-based directory structure, and to keep using Perl scripts, for the life of this RFC. It would be far better if IANA would start following Web best practices before this document is published as an RFC and use more universal local parts in these URLs.

On a process note, am I really the only person doing a WG LC review of this document? I'm not really even a WG member...

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium