The Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP) is a facetious communication protocol for controlling, monitoring, and diagnosing

coffee pot A coffeemaker, coffee maker or coffee machine is a cooking appliance used to brew coffee. While there are many different types of coffeemakers the two most common brewing principles use gravity or pressure to move hot water through coffee gr ...

s. It is specified in , published on 1 April 1998 as an April Fools' Day RFC, as part of an April Fools prank. An extension, HTCPCP-TEA, was published as RFC 7168 on 1 April 2014 to support brewing teas, which is also an April Fools' Day RFC.

Protocol

RFC 2324 was written by Larry Masinter, who describes it as a satire, saying "This has a serious purpose – it identifies many of the ways in which

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

has been extended inappropriately." The wording of the protocol made it clear that it was not entirely serious; for example, it notes that "there is a strong, dark, rich requirement for a protocol designed espressoly for the brewing of coffee". Despite the joking nature of its origins, or perhaps because of it, the protocol has remained as a minor presence online. The editor

Emacs Emacs , originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

includes a fully functional client side implementation of it, and a number of bug reports exist complaining about Mozilla's lack of support for the protocol. Ten years after the publication of HTCPCP, the ''Web-Controlled Coffee Consortium'' (''WC3'') published a first draft of "HTCPCP Vocabulary in RDF" in parody of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) "HTTP Vocabulary in RDF". On April 1, 2014, RFC 7168 extended HTCPCP to fully handle teapots.

Commands and replies

HTCPCP is an extension of

. HTCPCP requests are identified with the

Uniform Resource Identifier A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a unique sequence of characters that identifies a logical or physical resource used by web technologies. URIs may be used to identify anything, including real-world objects, such as people and places, conc ...

(URI) scheme coffee (or the corresponding word in any other of the 29 listed languages) and contain several additions to the HTTP methods: It also defines two error responses:

Save 418 movement

On 5 August 2017, Mark Nottingham, chairman of the IETF HTTPBIS Working Group, called for the removal of status code 418 "I'm a teapot" from the Node.js platform, a code implemented in reference to the original 418 "I'm a teapot" established in Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol. On 6 August 2017, Nottingham requested that references to 418 "I'm a teapot" be removed from the programming language Go and subsequently from Python's Requests and ASP.NET's HttpAbstractions library as well. In response, 15-year-old developer Shane Brunswick created a website, save418.com, and established the "Save 418 Movement", asserting that references to 418 "I'm a teapot" in different projects serve as "a reminder that the underlying processes of computers are still made by humans". Brunswick's site went viral in the hours following its publishing, garnering thousands of upvotes on the social platform Reddit, and causing the mass adoption of the "#save418" Twitter hashtag he introduced on his site. Heeding the public outcry, Node.js, Go, Python's Requests, and ASP.NET's HttpAbstractions library decided against removing 418 "I'm a teapot" from their respective projects. The unanimous support from the aforementioned projects and the general public prompted Nottingham to begin the process of having 418 marked as a reserved HTTP status code, ensuring that 418 will not be replaced by an official status code for the foreseeable future. On 5 October 2020, Python 3.9 released with an updated http library including 418 IM_A_TEAPOT status code. In the corresponding pull request, the Save 418 movement was directly cited in support of adoption.

Usage

The status code 418 is sometimes returned by servers when blocking a request, instead of the more appropriate

403 Forbidden HTTP 403 is an HTTP status code meaning access to the requested resource is forbidden. The server understood the request, but will not fulfill it. Specifications HTTP 403 provides a distinct error case from HTTP 401; while HTTP 401 is returned ...

. Around the time of the

2021–2022 Russo-Ukrainian crisis In March and April 2021, Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian military to begin massing thousands of personnel and equipment near its border with Ukraine and in Crimea, representing the largest mobilization since the annex ...

, the Russian military website mil.ru returned the HTTP 418 status code when accessed from outside of Russia as a DDoS attack protection measure. The change was first noticed in December of 2021.

References

External links