Is there a convention for referring to RFCs?

I see a mix of mostly just mentions of section numbers in the comments and sometimes URLs to specific section numbers of RFC 2616 (exclusively via www.w3.org).

In my opinion the URL makes sense if it is shown by godoc which seems to be the case in golang.org/x/net/lex/httplex.

Here are the inconsistencies with RFC-7230 i have found in net/http so far:

The handling of "hop-by-hop" Headers is defined differently:

Exactly when "close" connection options have to be sent has been
clarified. Also, "hop-by-hop" header fields are required to appear
in the Connection header field; just because they're defined as hop-
by-hop in this specification doesn't exempt them. (Section 6.1)

However the current behavior has to be kept to maintain compatibility.

Other than that RFC 7230 defines more forbidden trailer headers for chunked transfers (see section 4.1.2) than currently implemented.

Note that i only looked in the places where rfc 2616 was referenced explicitly , so its hard to tell if there are other non obvious inconsistencies.

Is there a convention for referring to RFCs?

There's no convention, but the document should look like a document, not a side note or writing to the back of a paper napkin. I'm fine with either RFC NNNN, the section X of RFC NNN or URL.

Change https://golang.org/cl/94095 mentions this issue: net/http: use RFC 723x as normative reference in docs

I uploaded a first patch with the documentation changes. It includes todos for inconsistencies.
However, i think these inconsistencies should be cleared up first, before the documentation change is submitted.

Thanks for tackling this issue.

these inconsistencies should be cleared up first

Please open a new issue for shooting such inconsistencies, for getting more eyeballs. I think that leaving TODOs and issues is fine for now because the transition from H1 to H2 is a bit complicated work and probably takes a bit long time.

Change https://golang.org/cl/94555 mentions this issue: http2: use RFC 723x as normative reference in docs

I have created an issue for the incorrect handling of Trailer headers : #23908

The handling of relative Location URIs in Redirect responses seem to be okay, but could use some addittional tests to ensure that fragments ar not thrown away. However im not sure if path.Clean should be called for absolute urls too. I will open another issue for discussion (or at least for additional tests) on this too. (edit: issue created: #23961)

Change https://golang.org/cl/111655 mentions this issue: net/http: update bundled http2