Http status code ‘I’m a teapot’ is safe for now

Http status code 418, also known as “I’m a teapot”, has received “reserved” status from the Internet Engineering Task Force. This happened after the organization made an attempt to remove the status code, sparking protests.

The code is part of the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, or rfc2324, which was conceived in 1998 as an April 1 joke. It’s a protocol for controlling and monitoring a coffee pot and, according to creator Larry Masinter, served as an illustration of the phenomenon of HTTP being expanded in all sorts of inappropriate ways.

The protocol has two status codes, including 418. It reads: “Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the error code ‘418 I’m a teapot’. The resulting entity body MAY be short and stout.” Recently, IETF working group chairman Mark Nottingham took it upon himself to remove the status code from, for example, Node.js and Google’s Go. It contained the code as easteregg.

His action, however, met with resistance and shortly afterwards a student created the save418 website. There he writes that the code is “a reminder that the underlying processes of computers are still made by humans.” Nottingham has now abandoned its attempt and has now assigned the code a ‘reserved’ status in the IANA registry, which prevents it from being reassigned to another target.

Htcpcp teapot. Photo: A.cilia, Wikipedia / Creative Commons