Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Michael Bednarek (talk | contribs) at 05:30, 23 November 2011 (WP:LAYOUT.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Diagram of a coffee percolator

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. Demonstrations of this behaviour exist.[6]

See also

References