[cyphar]

It's a response to this story (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14987460), where a contributor has been going to many different projects and attempting to remove language support for the 418 error code.

EDIT: Ah, so it's the same person. In which case it's more of a continuation, and I anticipate that the intention is to make implementations that allow 418 non-compliant.

[endgame]

Note that the "contributor" (Mark Nottingham) is also the author of the document in OP, and deserves a lot of credit for taking this approach. Given that his area of work is HTTP standards, I think he initially started removing 418 to tidy up and make things compliant and isn't just some bore who hates fun. Now he's managed to make everyone happy in a standards-compliant way.

[toomanybeersies]

It was interesting reading the threads on /r/webdev about this whole debacle. The threads were full of people saying that he's an arsehole with too much time on his hands who must hate fun.

Nobody actually stopped to read the guys bio and realise that he's more than qualified to be bringing up these issues. It doesn't help that the guy who made save418.com is literally 14 (which seems to be about the average age of /r/webdev).

[mystrman111]

The /r/webdev thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/6stdcj/http_error_c...) remained quite respectful actually, afaik there were no real hostile remarks directed towards Mark Nottingham within it. In fact, it's ironic - the very comment I'm replying to is probably more distasteful and antagonistic than anything that could be found in the Reddit thread.

[JimDabell]

He probably confused it with the /r/programming thread [0], where the top comments with hundreds of votes were stupid insults like "What a dick","miserable bastard", "the most boring man in the universe", "standards committee troll", "he had fun once and hated it", "Soulless, joyless, heathens":

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6sxea0/http_er...

[LukeShu]

Often reddit threads read more respectful after-the-fact; the less respectful comments either get downvoted enough that they aren't displayed unless you look for them, or are moderated away. Often they are much harsher early in the thread. I'm not sure if that ways the case here, but it is common enough that I wouldn't doubt it.

[mystrman111]

When comments are removed by mods on Reddit, they're replaced with the text "[REMOVED]", which doesn't appear once in the referenced thread (insults would not be removed in the first place though, they break no /r/webdev rules). And you can scroll to the bottom of the thread to see all the downvoted comments, none of which are are condescending towards Mark. So no, that isn't the case here.

[pwdisswordfish]

I believe the [removed] only appears in place of comments with replies that have not been deleted.

Though yeah, that still makes it rather implausible.

[LukeShu]

In the default sort mode ("best"), sufficiently downvoted comments won't be displayed at all, even if you do scroll all the way to the bottom.

[jacquesm]

Why should it matter that the guy who made save418.com is literally 14? Let's look at what he's accomplishing - in spite of his age - rather than whether or not he is substantially older or younger than the opposition in this argument. It seems like that's a pretty cheap argument to bring to the table.

[awirth]

For those that may not know, Mark is also co-chair of the HTTP Working Group on the IETF[1].

[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/charter/

[peterwwillis]

It's weird though. The origin spec is specifically a discrete protocol called HTCPCP, not HTTP, so it has nothing to do with HTTP standards. They can do whatever they want with 418 in HTTP.

[geofft]

They can, but they believe in rough consensus and working code and in being conservative in what they do and liberal in what they accept from others.

It's clear that a lot of real-world HTTP implementations are using HTTP 418 to mean I'm A Teapot, whether or not they should, and that reassigning it would cause practical difficulties.

[peterwwillis]

That's not clear to me. Nobody relies on the feature, it's a tiny piece of code, only some vendors support it, and it's not even part of the spec. (It also can't be reassigned because it was never assigned to begin with)

If they like 418, they can add it to the spec. But this idea that it's been "consumed" is weird. It's like saying <blink> was "consumed" in HTML because two browsers used to support it. It was just an unofficial feature of popular vendor software, and is now officially disavowed.

Basically what we're saying is we're not going to implement 418 in the spec, but at the same time, we're not going to let anyone use it?

[JoshTriplett]

> It's like saying <blink> was "consumed" in HTML because two browsers used to support it.

Which is accurate. Reintroducing a tag named "blink" into HTML to mean something other than "blinking text" would be a really bad idea for compatibility reasons.

[peterwwillis]

So we're trying to avoid breaking the internet by committing to people expecting an error when they're talking to a teapot? So that past implementations of clients connecting to teapots won't break?

Like I say, we could also just add it to the spec... But that would be ridiculous, because why would you support telling someone you were a teapot in an HTTP protocol, when the feature is only useful in a protocol for brewing coffee? That would be like taking a programming language's syntax for assigning data objects and turning it into it's own standard for a text file format.

Maybe a time traveler set this whole thing up 19 years ago just to troll people on standards boards.

[dexterdog]

Except blink is a string that means what it is. 418 is one of a small set of codes to use and has no purpose as it exists other than nonsense.

[vidarh]

Several discussions have included anecdotes from people about how they are using the 418 code for various things, so I don't know how you can be sure that nobody relies on it.

[concede_pluto]

Say you want to add some feature critical to correctness. "Request can't be committed until resent to other quorum members." Something serious like that. You can't use 418 for that feature because some non-conforming servers are already returning it as a joke. You'd have to triage new RFCs until you get one that isn't important enough to work reliably, and sacrifice it to use up the tainted code.

[vacri]

The 400-block is 69% free, after 28 years of development. If we're ever in the position where we need to free up just one more code, then we're already consuming beyond our capacity and will need to sort out an alternative anyway.

[habitue]

The contributor trying to remove 418 and the author of this RFC are the same person (Mark Nottingham[1])

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Nottingham

[ramses0]

...and seems aware that this is simply "tidying up" as opposed to someone from the "No-Fun League"... see the working title: draft-nottingham-thanks-larry-00

[LukeShu]

For context: "Larry" is the author of the April Fools' RFC that introduced 418.