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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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?
I just found out about this on Brodie Robertson’s yt channel! I am not a teapot btw!!
Haha, same here! I was so proud I knew what the title was referring to before reading the post. Lol
Glad to hear it, you should walk around with a HTTP 418 hat so more people know you’re not a teapot.
But then people would think they are a teapot
I just found out about this on Brodie Robertson’s yt channel! I am not a teapot btw!!
How do I know the government isn’t spying on me, cuz they could totally go and compromise all root certificates, thus RIP https.
Oh, and pardon, who the heck does still use http without the s?
Are you by any chance, British?
What a British thing to ask. Very apt sir, very apt.
Did the predilection for tea give me away?
I don’t have any questions but holy shit this is so cool.
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…
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
It’d be fantastic to get some drink brewing hardware together that actually supports this standard, that’d be the real icing on the cake. Are you aware of any people putting something together?
As it turns out, no: HTCPCP isn’t a complete definition, so it never resulted in physical hardware. Except, of course, for the various teapots with chips inside that respond “418” but don’t actually do any brewing.
So what’s better, tea or coffee?
As it turns out, I drink black coffee nowadays.
That’s a 419 when you surprise people with a coffee pot.
Aren’t you worried about your citizenship being revoked?
Coffee may be an offence worthy of the Tower, but I hope my Services To Tea offer mitigating circumstances when my case is brought before the King Prince.
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
Did you author any other standards and how high is the chance of a proposal being approved if you don’t have any accepted proposal yet?
7168 is my only foray into writing an Internet Standard RFC. If you have a good idea for one, you should definitely get in touch with the RFC Editors; I found them very approachable and willing to work with my idea, moulding it into a document that’s compliant to their (admittedly old-timey 60’s) documentation standards.
No question, I just want to thank you for being the type of person that would do this and thank you again for actually doing it. The world is a fun place. I like it.
Did people take it seriously? Unlike avian carrier, there is people connecting tea/coffee machine to the internet
Did people try to implement it for the sake of the joke (again, here I am thinking about the avian carrier)
What would be a current version of this April Fool - what technology would you create a standard for, what beverage would you interface it to?
The motivation for HTCPCP-TEA was that HTCPCP didn’t cover tea brewing. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any infused hot drinks that aren’t coffee or a tea of some kind…
Perhaps we need a homebrew beer request standard. The response lag would be tremendous though.
cocoa?
As it turns out, the standard almost caters for this directly:
Instead, an Alternates header as defined in RFC 2295 MUST be sent, with the available tea bags and/or leaf varieties as entries.
If cocoa and other loose powders count as a variety of tea leaf…
Ah yes, you’re a true programmer. That’ll become one of those decisions ossified into place 30 years from now that we need to work around, but it works because it’s good enough.
