I'm the author of an April Fool's Internet Standard, AMA

Two9A@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 796 points –

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 would be a current version of this April Fool - what technology would you create a standard for, what beverage would you interface it to?

The motivation for HTCPCP-TEA was that HTCPCP didn't cover tea brewing. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any infused hot drinks that aren't coffee or a tea of some kind...

Perhaps we need a homebrew beer request standard. The response lag would be tremendous though.

cocoa?

As it turns out, the standard almost caters for this directly:

Instead, an Alternates header as defined in RFC 2295 MUST be sent, with the available tea bags and/or leaf varieties as entries.

If cocoa and other loose powders count as a variety of tea leaf...

Ah yes, you're a true programmer. That'll become one of those decisions ossified into place 30 years from now that we need to work around, but it works because it's good enough.