IPv6 address/port format

[Wilfried Woeber, UniVie/ACOnet]

>  I've seen people use both "IPv6-addr port" (space sep.) and
>"IPv6-addr/port".  I think I really like using '/', and haven't yet
>found a place where that will cause problems except for in URIs.
>Using spaces is just universally compliated.  I guess we could use
>something like '%', but then again, me randomly proposing things here
>is probabaly not the best place to make suggestions usefully.  ;-)
>
>                        - Chris

  I suppose we're suffering from a severe case of character overload:
  
  In the IPv4 world the convention is a.b.c.d:port, with a,b,c and d an
  external encoding base 10 of the 4-bytes of the 32bit address.
  
  Talking in routing terms the convention is a.b.c.d/prefix, with a.b.c.d
  being the network part of the address and a prefix length [1..32] in
  bits, again given as a number base 10.
  
  In the IPv6 world, both the ".", as well as the ":" as well as the "/"
  are being used to specify the address and/or the length of the routing
  prefix.
  The external erpresentation uses base 16, with the 128 bits grouped into
  8 fields of 16 bits each, separated by colons (see RFC 2373):
  
	FE80::02A0:24FF:FE9D:5094 (e.g. for a MAC Address of 00a0.249d.5094)
	
	3FFE:8034:80::0/48        (e.g. for a routing prefix)
	
        ::FFFF:10.2.3.4           (e.g. for a mixed v4/v6 environment)
	
  We already ran into the port specification problem for IPv6, last resort
  was to use white-space. Hmmm....

  Wilfried.
 --------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Wilfried Woeber                :  e-mail: Woeber@CC.UniVie.ac.at
  Computer Center - ACOnet       :  Tel: +43 1 4277 - 140 33
  Vienna University              :  Fax: +43 1 4277 - 9 140
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