I'm the author of an April Fool's Internet Standard, AMA
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!
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.
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?
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.
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 number one question I would ask about HTTP would be: Why was the "Referer" header initially added and why wasn't it removed from standard to this day. In my opinion the server, I'm going to, should never know where I came from.
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
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?
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.
e.g. RFC3514 (an 'evil' flag you can set in malicious packets so a firewall knows to drop them) was actually used by a few people to see what would happen, with interesting results.
What made you think of using drink making appliances specifically?
Why didn't you for example use a different one, like a washing machine, a fridge or a microwave or even something else entirely?
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?