It seems to me that the underlying problem here is that fixed port
numbers is not really the right solution to the protocol identification
problem.
When this was first proposed the number of machines on the Internet was
small and there was no DNS, only the host file.
The port number allocation scheme is really trying to do something that
should be done by the naming infrastructure. This is what SRV is for.
With SRV there is no longer any need for new protocol port assignments.
Protocol designers should be told to apply for an SRV prefix instead.
There are certain limitations to the SRV prefix scheme but these are
entirely fixable. All we actually need is one new RR to allow one level
of indirection to be introduced. With that in place it is possible to
use prefixed SRV records in place of port assignments and prefixed TXT
records as a means of expressing protocol configuration information.
Incidentially with these changes in place the DNS then provides all the
infrastructure that is required to deploy Web Services. UDDI becomes
superfluous. Existing deployed infrastructures such as HTTP and SMTP can
be developed in ways that are architecturally equivalent to the WS-*
approach.
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