Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol

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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 April 1 1998. Although the RFC describing the protocol is an April Fools' Day joke and not to be taken seriously, it specifies the protocol itself accurately enough for it to be a real, non-fictional protocol. The powerful editor Emacs actually includes a fully functional implementation of it, and a number of patches exist to extend Mozilla in this direction.

HTCPCP is an extension of HTTP. HTCPCP requests are identified with the URI scheme coffee: (or the same 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 responding entity MAY be short and stout.
  • 491 Missing Coffee : The HTCPCP is out of coffee and/or is out of milk.
  • 453 Milk off : The milk in the coffee has gone past it's "use by date" and should be removed from the coffee.

External links

  • RFC 2324, the full HTCPCP RFC specification.
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