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!
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.
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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 :)