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!

    • Two9A@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      It’s great: the Internet should have a bit of that sense of whimsy, and knowing that there’s official support in many libraries for “you’re asking me for coffee, but I’m a teapot” is one of those things that gets me through the day.

  • boonhet@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • boonhet@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • kevingranade@cdda.social
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      1 year ago

      http.cat was absolutely critical when I transitioned from general application development to web backend development. Not a joke, it was just a super readable site listing the codes with a short and memorable url.

  • Veraticus@lib.lgbt
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    1 year ago

    Congratulations on creating such a cool piece of Internet arcana!

    What do you think the silliest/most useless response status code is aside from 418?

    Were there any codes you wish had been included that haven’t been for some reason?

    • Two9A@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      I always rather enjoyed the double entendre of “420 Enhance Your Calm”, which was an unofficial response from Twitter’s original API before “429 Too Many Requests” was standardized.

      But I can’t think of any codes which aren’t already in there, that I’d use; there are a bunch that don’t see much use, like “410 Gone”, so the list could do with trimming down if anything.

    • Two9A@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • tias@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        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?

        • Two9A@lemmy.worldOP
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Revan343@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            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

            • Two9A@lemmy.worldOP
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              1 year ago

              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.

  • Erk@cdda.social
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    1 year ago

    I had been an advocate of getting just an ordinary person to do the first Lemmy ama but apparently we’ve got an absolute legend.

    Have you ever had a favourite reference to your joke come up?

    • Two9A@lemmy.worldOP
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      I did go to a conference once where they were handing out laptop stickers, and in the pack was a 418 teapot.

      Of course, a week after I stuck that to my machine, it died. Telling the laptop it was a teapot didn’t agree with it, I guess.

    • Two9A@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      That’s actually the topic of the talk! Around 1995-96, HTTP was picking up all kinds of use outside the academic community, and people were tacking extensions on left and right; one of the biggest was file upload support, which was done by throwing HTTP and email into a room and having them fight it out. Which is how we ended up with the monstrosity that is “sending emails over HTTP”, also known as “posting a form”.

      The author of HTCPCP decided to codify some of his concerns with these, partly as a joke; I noticed long afterward that his joke was only standardized for coffee, which Personally Offended me as a citizen of a tea-drinking nation.

    • Two9A@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Deebster@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Oops, RTFM. Well, thanks for fighting the good fight with the power of your reputation.

  • blazarious@mylem.me
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    1 year ago

    How do you feel about people joking about and using 404 far off from HTTP?

    Also: yay, AMAs have finally arrived. Who’s gonna verify your identity, though?

    • Two9A@lemmy.worldOP
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      The fact that otherwise non-technical people joke about staying in hotel room 404 just shows how pervasive the modern Internet has become. As an aside, it also shows the importance of a good error message; there are some errors (like “Not Found”) in HTTP that are simple and clear, and some (“Bad Gateway”?) that are more impenetrable.

      No-one jokes about staying in room 504, and the room service never arriving.

      (And perhaps one of the larger Lemmies can get a hold of Victoria, get these AMAs going for real.)

      • boonhet@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        It’s discontinued as a code, but perhaps we could get people using 102: Processing as a response online when someone says something unexpected or stupid-sounding.

      • Akasazh@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        I once made an historical 404 joke saying ‘Athens not found’ as in 404 bc Athens lost the Peloponnesian war against Sparta.

        I don’t think many of my fellow students got the http error level of the joke, though.

        • MacroCyclo@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          That’s sounds like a joke that is always followed by a long and contrived explanation followed by an awkward silence. The best kind of joke.

    • Two9A@lemmy.worldOP
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      There are joke RFCs almost every year, so it’s not unprecedented to add to the standards. This year, one of the additions was a Death Flag to TCP, to indicate when a connection is about to terminate. The RFC Editors are very approachable when it comes to the Apr 1st RFCs: a “real” standard would need to be drafted by someone actually in the field, but the Apr 1st’s are open to public submissions as long as you’re willing to redraft/edit in accordance with the documentation standards.

      It’s worth noting that the Clacks header is an unofficial campaign, and hasn’t been standardised; the 'Pedia states that some 84,000 sites return X-Clacks-Overhead, and my own is one.

  • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Two9A@lemmy.worldOP
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      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.

        • Spaceman Spiff@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Nah, coffee pots are strictly clients in the world of tomorrow. They connect to a (datamining) cloud service, and you control it through an app.

          • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Let’s be real…that’s the world of today. The world of tomorrow will either be more intrusive, or we’ll be talking to children around a fire about this wonderful drink made from beans that woke you up in the morning. And they won’t understand what we’re talking about, because the only other forms of life that survived are roaches, a godzilla sized Cher, and a burgeoning race…a new life form never before seen on this world or any other…sentient twinkies…

  • Cris@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

  • Fenzik@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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

      • body_by_make@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        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?

        • Two9A@lemmy.worldOP
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          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.

          • ShunkW@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

      • Maiznieks@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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 :)

  • 200ok@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Every once and a while I’d just like to see 200 get some love, but no. It’s all 404 this, 502 that.

    I’m just “OK”. It’s like being the middle child of response codes.