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?
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.
200 is probably the most common status no? Many successful responses will give 200 in the backend
OK
username checks out
Thank you for fixing a critical flaw in the original RFC.
What did you think about the Save 418 Movement? Were you involved in it in any way?
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.
Oops, RTFM. Well, thanks for fighting the good fight with the power of your reputation.
I need an ELI5 for this I’m a stupid Gen Z
I don’t have any questions but holy shit this is so cool.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
Yeah, GraphQL has adopted this practice as a standard and it’s kind of sad.
Well there is really only one question…
Pineapple on Pizza?
Out.
Can’t stand pineapple at the best of times, on pizza is another level of wrong.
Hear hear
Getting really tired of this meme
Yes, obviously. Where else should it be at if not my pizza?
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
What’s the funniest legitimate non-joke standardization detail you’ve come across?
I enjoy that the original draft for the Referer header spelled it wrong, and now we’re all stuck with the typo forever…
Can someone elaborate on this please?
Edit: oh jeez. I’m so used to reading “referer” I didn’t even realize it was a typo.
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.
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.
I hope that user agent will be gone too. It does nothing except demand that you install chrome or spy on you
In the early days of hypertext there was also a lot of talk of “the semantic web”, where one proposal was that all links should be two-way, refer may have been a compromise to let people try to implement that on top of the one-way HTTP/HTML
Follow-up question. Shouldn’t it be spelled “referrer”?
It should, certainly. But the original draft introducing the header had a typo, and now we’re all stuck with it.
I’ve heard that the internet is a series of tubes.
Can you confirm?
I never understood the beef people had with that. The Internet is a series of tubes, of various widths and sizes, with inputs at random points in the stream.
Plumbing analogies are apt.
I’m actually going to that conference! What’s the title of your talk? I’ll be sure to attend it!
Excellent. I’m on Stage 4 on the Thursday afternoon: “Brewing Tea Over The Internet”.
Should be fun times, see you there.
You can unilaterally create another status code. What do you create?
I quite like the idea of HTTP 256 Binary Data Follows, which is just 200 OK but you asked for a non-text content type file.
Wasn’t there a new HTTP action recently proposed for “This is a JSON RPC request that we’ve convinced ourselves is actually REST and we’ve been using POST and someone finally pointed out that that was stupid”?
Not a new status code but still vaguely amusing.
Is the internet still kept in Big Ben?
Yes, unless Jen needs to borrow it for a presentation.
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?
As it turns out, one of the Apr 1st RFCs for this year covers AI Sarcasm Detection, but I can see more serious protocols arising for the transfer of AI model data and/or training procedures in the coming years.
I’d also hope ActivityPub reaches Internet Standard level, though it may fall outside the IETF’s scope of operations.
