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

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What was the inspiration for these internet standards?

[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 year ago

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.