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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How do you feel about 418 being included in many legitimate http libraries?
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.
Ironically, it’s a cup of coffee that gets me through the day
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.
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.
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 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?
What was the inspiration for these internet standards?
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.
SYN
RST
ack :(
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.
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”.
The Evil Bit sounds like the real Do Not Track header field
What’s wild is that IPoAC was actually tested, and shown to have a higher throughput than the local ISP. Source
Relevant what if: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
There really is an xkcd for everything…
Wow. Never knew about these :)
Is the internet still kept in Big Ben?
Yes, unless Jen needs to borrow it for a presentation.
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
Do you regret adding it, or with the knowledge you have today, would you still add the 418?
Since a bunch of languages have not implemented it, or/and has long discussions about it:
https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/15650
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/21326
https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/14644
https://github.com/psf/requests/issues/4238
https://github.com/aspnet/HttpAbstractions/issues/915You’d have to catch up with Mr Masinter to get his opinion on adding error 418, I’m afraid; that piece of the business wasn’t my work.
I’m happy it’s there though: it may have sparked flamewars, but at this point what hasn’t. It does bring somewhat of that sense of humanity to the whole enterprise of working on the Internet.
I remember when I learned about this, I was working on an absurdly large project on my own. I was lost in all the details and losing hope of ever finishing. I was working on the backend API when I learned of this and took the time to implement the 418 response. It felt silly and brought the fun back to the project.
I remember when I first learned of error 418 and it did really help me understand that the Internet as we know it was made and shaped by regular people with senses of humor. Helped make it seem a bit less daunting/intimidating to understand.
It reminds me of how the Network Port 666 is specifically reserved for doom, always love Easter eggs like that in officially used protocols.
I’m just finding out about this trivia now but I’m a big fan
Sheesh, some people have no sense of humour.
Personally I don’t have any problems with it (if that was directed at me) - I’ve added 418 as “unhandled exception code” response to a bunch of applications, so I can easily differentiate whether my application is throwing an error, or whether it’s some middleware gateway AWS io-thing
I was just curious what OP thought about it, since in the early days it wasn’t uncommon to add goofs or easter-eggs into software, but nowadays not done so much… and apparently the “HTTP Working Group” doesn’t like it either… So I was curious whether OP though in hindsight whether it should’ve been added or not
How can it be unhandled? It’s right there in the song, just before the spout!
What are some of your favorite accounts to follow on mastodon?
Also, will your talk be recorded?
My following list; of note is Lisa Melton, whose bio says “Follow me and I’ll fill your timeline with boosts”. She ain’t lying.
Looks like some of the talks from last year were released on the conference’s YouTube, so: hard to say if the recording will be available. I’ll (see if I can) remember to ask on the day.
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
I’m actually going to that conference! What’s the title of your talk? I’ll be sure to attend it!
Excellent. I’m on Stage 4 on the Thursday afternoon: “Brewing Tea Over The Internet”.
Should be fun times, see you there.
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.
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.
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…
