Let’s get the AMAs kicked off on Lemmy, shall we.
Almost ten years ago now, I wrote RFC 7168, “Hypertext Coffeepot Control Protocol for Tea Efflux Appliances” which extends HTCPCP to handle tea brewing. Both Coffeepot Control Protocol and the tea-brewing extension are joke Internet Standards, and were released on Apr 1st (1998 and 2014). You may be familiar with HTTP error 418, “I’m a teapot”; this comes from the 1998 standard.
I’m giving a talk on the history of HTTP and HTCPCP at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin later this month, and I need an FAQ section; AMA about the Internet and HTTP. Let’s try this out!
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I have no questions, but I want to let people here know that there are two excellent websites related to this: http.cat and http.dog, for looking up HTTP status codes.
For an example, if http.cat/418 doesn’t brighten your day, I don’t think there’s much that can.
I love this. Thank you so much.
You’re welcome! I try to share this with people whenever I can, hoping that it makes someone’s day better. It certainly gives me a lot of joy when I can respond to something with a relevant http cat, though the few people I do it to might be getting a little annoyed.
What’s your take on the fediverse frontier?
I think it’s excellent out here. I was stuck on Reddit for the longest time, and this recent debacle has pushed me to explore the networks at the edge; this feels a lot more like the Internet of old. The analogy of email is apt, I think, with the accounts on multiple servers and the interplay between.
You awaken my nostalgia, curiosity and sense of adventure when you say “explore the networks at the edge”. Are there any other networks than lemmy / mastodon that you would suggest checking out?
Internet Relay Chat’s been one of those things that’s always felt out on the edge. I’ve been on EFnet since perhaps '03, and it’s a lot quieter than it was…
With people moving en masse away from the centralized sites and their Firebase-implemented chats, we may see a pick up in traffic on the IRC networks, which would be good to see.
What are some interesting channels on EFnet? I basically grew up on Foonetic, but moved to Slashnet when #xkcd did. I don’t pay near as much attention to IRC as I used to, but would like to change that
I haven’t been exploring in the depths of EFnet in …many years. I’m confined to the programming-related channels I found in the Way Back When, nowadays: at the moment, #c is probably the most active and it’s almost all old-timers.
Are you tingly anywhere?
Thank you for fixing a critical flaw in the original RFC.
What did you think about the Save 418 Movement? Were you involved in it in any way?
My endorsement is at the bottom of that page, in fact. I wasn’t an active campaigner, but a word in favor was the least I could do.
Oops, RTFM. Well, thanks for fighting the good fight with the power of your reputation.
Is the internet still kept in Big Ben?
Yes, unless Jen needs to borrow it for a presentation.
What code should be used if we are expecting something to be a teapot? In this scenario it seems a 4XX is inappropriate because there is no error
If you’re writing a TEA-compliant client, you’d send the BREW request and expect a 300 Multiple Options back, whereby the server will tell you which teabags are installed. You’re correct that there’ll be no error, unless all the bag stocks are out server-side.
That’d return 503 Service Unavailable, of course.
We’re there any early internet standards you were super bullish on at the time that didn’t get picked up? In retrospect, if it had been adopted do you think it would have had the impact you were hoping for
That’s a tough one: most standards are codified as such because they’re already seeing wide use. The major example of one that’s been worked the other way around is IPv6: it’s been a standard for a very long time, and still doesn’t seem to be seeing adoption.
Of course, I wouldn’t say I was bullish on IPv6. 32 bits is enough for anyone, right.
What’s the funniest legitimate non-joke standardization detail you’ve come across?
I enjoy that the original draft for the Referer header spelled it wrong, and now we’re all stuck with the typo forever…
I’d be happy if we’d just accepted “referer” as the correct spelling for everything, but instead we have the “Referrer-Policy” header, so now I need to check the correct spelling for anything involving referring…
I do sort of like the idea that because we want to keep backwards compatibility on software we just change the language instead since that’s easier.
You can unilaterally create another status code. What do you create?
Wasn’t there a new HTTP action recently proposed for “This is a JSON RPC request that we’ve convinced ourselves is actually REST and we’ve been using POST and someone finally pointed out that that was stupid”?
Not a new status code but still vaguely amusing.
I quite like the idea of HTTP 256 Binary Data Follows, which is just 200 OK but you asked for a non-text content type file.
I loved sharing this with my senior who hadn’t seen it before, and it gave our small team a Ggod chuckle one afternoon. Thanks for your creation.
With the absence of a crystal ball, but with excellent inner knowledge, what future standards could you see being implemented in the next 10 years for internet?
As it turns out, one of the Apr 1st RFCs for this year covers AI Sarcasm Detection, but I can see more serious protocols arising for the transfer of AI model data and/or training procedures in the coming years.
I’d also hope ActivityPub reaches Internet Standard level, though it may fall outside the IETF’s scope of operations.
Was RFC 7168 written with Captain Picard’s tea Earl Gray, hot in mind? If not, are follow up modifications planned?
So replicators are kind of a special case: they can make anything already fully prepared, without the need for a brewing command to be sent. It’s possible that by the 24th century, there’s a compatibility layer between Replicator Intermediate Language and HTCPCP, but I’ll leave that to future generations to establish.
What a fun AMA topic lol. I dont have a question, I’m just glad youre here, spreading the good gospel of your goofy internet standard
Not a question, but we use 418 in production! We have a nginx router that routes pages based on its path to either old frontend or new frontend. I wanted some easy way to handle the routing (and to not repeat myself), so I set the new frontend as a handler for 418 error and then just return 418 in the nginx for any page I want on new UI. I chose 418 because the others could be actually used by the old frontend and it could get all weird.
This is actually a good use of 418 in production, and one I’ve come across before: if you need to perform some custom handling and throwing a HTTP error is the only sensible way to do it, 418 is always available.
Unless your server really is a coffeepot, which is …unlikely.
Getting more likely with each passing year.
Are you by any chance, British?
Did the predilection for tea give me away?
What a British thing to ask. Very apt sir, very apt.
I don’t have any questions but holy shit this is so cool.
What’s the most impactful 418-related incident you’ve witnessed? I remember a few years ago npm went down and was returning 418 which spawned jokes and chaos across the web
The incident you mention is probably the most impactful, but there’s also the time the Russian military blocked IPs outside Russia by returning 418 instead of the more logical 403.
I know russian a bit and jargon for russian word “teapot” is also commonly used as “dummy” or “novice”. 418 for foreigners might have been on purpose there which brings Your April’s fool joke to a nation wide level :)
Yeah, I’ve seen people refer to this as the “fuck off” of response codes, especially during that incident. How does that make you feel?
It’s not up to Mr Masinter or myself to police the usage of anything defined in the standard; if people feel like being assholes regarding the issuance of 418 errors, at least they’re being whimsical assholes.
Could be worse; could be 200 with an error message inside, negating the entire point of error codes. I see that all the time.
Yeah, GraphQL has adopted this practice as a standard and it’s kind of sad.
When I was fixing up a legacy API app at an old job, I realized they did exactly that. I cleared it with my boss and started fixing up our error codes - pretty much all 401, 403, and 422. This blew up an integration with another app that literally threw exceptions on those codes rather than handling them. I died inside as it was my first software dev job. My first rollback of a change as well.
