This would have the benefit of bringing that initial certificate negotiation outside of the TLS black-box. For years, TLS deployment was held back because you couldn't have multiple domains on a single IP, long after the problem had been solved for HTTP.
Later, SNI was added to TLS, but the change wouldn't be rolled out to Windows XP users (except Firefox which used its own TLS implementation).
By using HTTP, you'd have the Host: header right away and could even introduce new certificate formats by looking at the Accept: header. This sort of thing is built into HTTP but had to be retrofitted with much pain and anguish into TLS.
This would have the benefit of bringing that initial certificate negotiation outside of the TLS black-box. For years, TLS deployment was held back because you couldn't have multiple domains on a single IP, long after the problem had been solved for HTTP.
Later, SNI was added to TLS, but the change wouldn't be rolled out to Windows XP users (except Firefox which used its own TLS implementation).
By using HTTP, you'd have the Host: header right away and could even introduce new certificate formats by looking at the Accept: header. This sort of thing is built into HTTP but had to be retrofitted with much pain and anguish into TLS.