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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, GraphQL has adopted this practice as a standard and it’s kind of sad.
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 :)
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.
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.
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?
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.
Was it hard to get this standardized back in the good ol’ days?
Do you think it would be as easy to do it now? If not, what challenges and hurdles would a RFC have to overcome?
The last thing I know that was pretty “significant” is the GNU Terry Pratchett header (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett#Death) and that was a community effort.
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.
Thank you for contributing to the magic of the old school internet.
My question: How does one get to write an RFC? Do you have to become part of a certain group, or just be known in certain circles, or do you just start writing and then submit it somewhere? If I had a great idea that I think should become an RFC, what is the process to make this a reality?
For Apr 1st RFCs in particular, the process is that you write your document in conformance to the RFC Editor’s Style Guide and email it to the editor directly. If you have a not-a-joke standard that you’d like to be considered, that’ll go through as an Internet Draft first, and then there are stages of review.
I haven’t been through the latter, but the editors are very approachable over email; I had no issues submitting my RFC for review and revision.
Well there is really only one question…
Pineapple on Pizza?
Getting really tired of this meme
Out.
Can’t stand pineapple at the best of times, on pizza is another level of wrong.
Hear hear
Yes, obviously. Where else should it be at if not my pizza?
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.
What other such joke standards (by you or others) do you like?
A little lower down the stack, I always liked the Evil Bit in TCP, a standard which removes all need for firewalls heuristics by requiring malware or packets with evil intent to set the Evil Bit. The receiver can simply drop packets with the Evil Bit set, and thus be entirely safe forever from bad traffic.
At the physical interface layer where data meets real life, I especially enjoy IP over Avian Carrier; that link in particular is to the QoS definition which extends the original spec for carrying packets by carrier pigeon.
The Evil Bit sounds like the real Do Not Track header field
Someone tested the evil bit and found a selection of real-world networks that react to its presence
Fun read, thanks for the link!
With the advances on SDcards, IPoAC is getting better and better.
As the saying goes, “for bandwidth, nothing beats a truck full of
tapes1TB MicroSDs hurtling down the highway”.
Wow. Never knew about these :)
What’s the process for submitting RFCs? And how do they pick which joke RFC they’ll publish? That’s a meeting I’d like to be a fly on the wall of
For “real” RFCs that aren’t Apr 1st jokes, there’s an independent submissions track for the public to write Internet-Drafts and then submit them into the review process.
With the joke RFCs, they get emailed straight to the editor at least two weeks beforehand. I’m not privy to the selection meeting, but I expect it’s fun.
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…
Can someone elaborate on this please?
Edit: oh jeez. I’m so used to reading “referer” I didn’t even realize it was a typo.
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.
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
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.
username checks out
200 is probably the most common status no? Many successful responses will give 200 in the backend
OK
