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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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!
The Evil Bit sounds like the real Do Not Track header field
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 :)
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/915Sheesh, 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!
You’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 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 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’m just finding out about this trivia now but I’m a big fan
Well there is really only one question…
Pineapple on Pizza?
Getting really tired of this meme
Yes, obviously. Where else should it be at if not my pizza?
Out.
Can’t stand pineapple at the best of times, on pizza is another level of wrong.
Hear hear
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
