Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol
The Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP for short) is a protocol for controlling, monitoring, and diagnosing coffee pots.
HTCPCP is specified in the jocular RFC 2324, published on 1 April 1998.[1] Although the RFC describing the protocol is an April Fools' Day joke, it specifies the protocol accurately enough for it to be a real, non-fictional protocol. The editor Emacs actually includes a fully functional implementation of it,[2] and a number of bug reports exist complaining about Mozilla's lack of support for the protocol.[3] Ten years after the publication of HTCPCP, the fictional Web-Controlled Coffee Consortium (WC3) published a first draft of "HTCPCP Vocabulary in RDF"[4] in analogy of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) "HTTP Vocabulary in RDF".[5]
Commands and replies
HTCPCP is an extension of HTTP. HTCPCP requests are identified with the URI scheme coffee: (or the corresponding word in any other of the 29 listed languages) and contain several additions to the HTTP methods:
BREW or POST |
Causes the HTCPCP server to brew coffee |
GET |
Retrieves coffee from the HTCPCP server |
PROPFIND |
Finds out metadata about the coffee |
WHEN |
Says "when", causing the HTCPCP server to stop pouring milk into the coffee (if applicable) |
It also defines two error responses:
406 Not Acceptable |
The HTCPCP server is unable to brew coffee for some reason; the response should indicate a list of acceptable coffee types. |
418 I'm a teapot |
The HTCPCP server is a teapot; the resulting entity may be short and stout. |
See also
References
- ^ Network Working Group — Request for Comments: 2324
- ^ Emacs extension: coffee.el
- ^ Bug 46647 — (coffeehandler) HTCPCP not supported (RFC2324) at bugzilla.mozilla.org
- ^ Chief Arabica (Web-Controlled Coffee Consortium): HTCPCP Vocabulary in RDF – WC3 RFC Draft 01 April 2008. Accessed 17 August 2009.
- ^ Johannes Koch et al (editors): "HTTP Vocabulary in RDF". Accessed 17 August 2009.