Asklemmy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 fact that otherwise non-technical people joke about staying in hotel room 404 just shows how pervasive the modern Internet has become. As an aside, it also shows the importance of a good error message; there are some errors (like "Not Found") in HTTP that are simple and clear, and some ("Bad Gateway"?) that are more impenetrable.

No-one jokes about staying in room 504, and the room service never arriving.

(And perhaps one of the larger Lemmies can get a hold of Victoria, get these AMAs going for real.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You know sometimes you click on a link and it says "404 not found?" 404 is an HTTP status code. basically when you click on a website your browser makes an "HTTP request" to that website to get the web page, and it'll respond with a code to tell the status. 2xx is ideal, since it means OK. 4xx means it's an error on your end. (404, you requested a nonexistent link.) 5xx means it's a server error.

This person made 418, a status code for "I'm a teapot". It was intended as an april fools joke but it's used sometimes for when the server doesn't want to handle a request from the client.

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.

I enjoy that the original draft for the Referer header spelled it wrong, and now we're all stuck with the typo forever...

I've just done some quick browsing to see if there's a written-down motivation for Referer existing, and there's this on the Wikipedia: "Many blogs publish referrer information in order to link back to people who are linking to them, and hence broaden the conversation."

Which I guess makes sense, in the context of the original use of HTTP as an academic publishing protocol, but it's gained cruft and nefariousness since wider adoption came about.

There are good arguments for stripping Referer from the standard, and yours is one of the most cogent; if Referer is still a thing in another 30 years, I'd be surprised.