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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]

188 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!

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've heard that the internet is a series of tubes.

Can you confirm?

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

It's because of the very impassioned speech by then-Senator Ted "Tubes" Stevens, where he demonstrated that he clearly had no idea how any of it worked. You could hear the lobbyists in every bit that he parroted, without absorbing it. He also had formed a strong opinion already, despite clearly having just been told how it works.

It's not that it's a bad analogy. It's that it's (somewhat) reductionist, and most famously associated with an idiot.