418
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418 is a little teapot, short and stout. Here is my handle, here is my spout. When I get all steamed up, hear me shout! Tip me over and pour me out!
Specifically, an April Fools joke, specified by RFC 2324: Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0). The HTTP 418 status was later reserved by RFC 9110: HTTP Semantics acknowledging it is “deployed as a joke often enough for the code to be unusable for any future use”.
16 years after the original April Fools, an “extension to HTCPCP to allow for pots to provide networked tea-brewing facilities” was published in the form of RFC 7168: The Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol for Tea Efflux Appliances (HTCPCP-TEA). This extends the use of the 418 error to all “TEA-capable pots that are not provisioned to brew coffee”.
Examples
Error 418 (I’m a teapot)!? (archived) shows a customised error page and returns the HTTP 418 status code. The graphic will pour a cup of tea, triggered by interacting with it or by tilting your (mobile) device. The animation uses a sprite sheet and CSS.
- 2014-08-22 : How Google Treats HTTP 418 - I'm A Teapot (archived)
- 🎥 With video! Google's Teapot 418 Error Page, It Pours Tea on YouTube.
- 2014-08-26 : New Google Easter Egg For SEO Geeks: Server Status 418, I’m A Teapot (archived)
- 2014-08-27 : Google Teapot Easter Egg (archived)
Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow uses (used) 418 as an easter egg error code for failing XSRF/CSRF checks during form submissions, e.g. during login.
There's really no good HTTP status code for an XSRF violation, but it feels like it should be a class 4 code. Any objection to returning a 418?
― 2013-06-22 : Answer to “Stack Overflow returning HTTP error code 418 (I'm a teapot)?” (archived)
See Also
- events/2018-04-18-homebrew-website-club
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAsrsMPftOI
- 🍵
- https://save418.com/
- Were you looking for Teacup?
- I’m a Little Teapot (Wikipedia)
- Even people can be teapots, strike the pose
- brainstorm: a /418 well known name page that returns a page with photo of an indieweb person's current teapot? Or history of their personal teapots? Maybe rel=alternate type=image/jpeg for auto discovery of the actual photo because conneg--
- There was a discussion on Google+ started by Google’s John Mueller, which may have led to people finding the Google example. The comments had a few people talk about creating 418 pages for themselves, but nothing really came out of that. SEO people discussed PageRank.
- The only example from there still available today is https://websiteadvantage.com.au/Im-A-Teapot
- https://thenewstack.io/tempest-teapot-error-compleat-history-418-return-code/
- https://exceptionnotfound.net/http-418-im-a-teapot-just-a-joke-or-something-more/