Asklemmy

43963 readers

1220 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

1007

I'm the author of an April Fool's Internet Standard, AMA (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by Two9A@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

183 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Two9A@lemmy.world 30 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Cqrd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] Two9A@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Cqrd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah, GraphQL has adopted this practice as a standard and it’s kind of sad.

[–] ShunkW@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Maiznieks@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

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 :)