computer science

Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol

Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol rather than just read about it. In short: The Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP) is a facetious communication protocol for controlling, monitoring, and diagnosing coffee pots. As part of Internet Engineering Task Force's Request for Comments, RFC 2324 is published on 1 April 1998 as an April Fools' Day RFC, as part of an April Fools prank.

Key takeaways

Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP) is a facetious communication protocol for controlling, monitoring, and diagnosing coffee pots. As part of Internet Engineering Task Force's Request for Comments, RFC 2324 is 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, also as an April Fools' Day RFC in error 418.

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 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 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 (W3C)'s "HTTP Vocabulary in RDF". On April 1, 2014, RFC 7168 extended HTCPCP to fully handle teapots.

Commands and replies

HTCPCP is an extension of HTTP. HTCPCP requests are identified with the Uniform Resource Identifier (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 three 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 used as an Easter egg in some websites, such as Google.com's "I'm a teapot" Easter egg. Status 418 is also sometimes returned by servers when blocking a request, instead of the more appropriate 403 Forbidden, or 404 Not Found. Around the time of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, 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. There have been multiple compliant implementations of the protocol, including servers programmed in Go, Python and JavaScript, with at least the latter one having been used to request a real pot of coffee.

See also Trojan Room coffee pot Internet of things List of HTTP status codes § 4xx client errors Utah teapot

References

External links Google's demo page: Error 418 (I'm a teapot)!? Package teapot HTCPCP-TEA implementation by David Skinner save418.com error418.net Archived 2021-01-07 at the Wayback Machine

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol

In research: Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1998 hoaxes, Application layer protocols, April Fools' Day jokes, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol in simple terms?

Why does Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol.