



httpbis                                                    M. Nottingham
Internet-Draft                                        September 22, 2017
Intended status: Standards Track
Expires: March 26, 2018


                   Reserving the 418 HTTP Status Code
                    draft-nottingham-thanks-larry-00

Abstract

   [RFC2324] was an April 1 RFC that lampooned the various ways HTTP was
   abused; one such abuse was the definition of the application-specific
   418 (I'm a Teapot) status code.

   In the intervening years, this status code has been widely
   implemented as an "easter egg", and therefore is effectively consumed
   by this use.

   This document changes 418 to the status of "Reserved" in the IANA
   HTTP Status Code registry to reflect that.

Note to Readers

   _RFC EDITOR: please remove this section before publication_

   The issues list for this draft can be found at
   https://github.com/mnot/I-D/labels/thanks-larry.

   The most recent (often, unpublished) draft is at
   https://mnot.github.io/I-D/thanks-larry/.

   Recent changes are listed at https://github.com/mnot/I-D/commits/gh-
   pages/thanks-larry.

   See also the draft's current status in the IETF datatracker, at
   https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-nottingham-thanks-larry/.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.




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Internet-Draft                     418                    September 2017


   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
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   This Internet-Draft will expire on March 26, 2018.

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Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   3.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   4.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3

1.  Introduction

   [RFC2324] was an April 1 RFC that lampooned the various ways HTTP was
   abused; one such abuse was the definition of the application-specific
   418 (I'm a Teapot) status code.

   In the intervening years, this status code has been widely
   implemented as an "Easter Egg", and therefore is effectively consumed
   by this use.

   This document changes 418 to the status of "Reserved" in the IANA
   HTTP Status Code registry to reflect that.

   This indicates that the status code cannot be assigned to other
   applications currently.  If future circumstances require its use
   (e.g., exhaustion of all other 4NN status codes), it can be re-
   assigned to another use.




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Internet-Draft                     418                    September 2017


   Implementations are encouraged to avoid "squatting" on status codes
   in this manner; while there are a number of unassigned status codes
   in each range currently, unofficial, uncoordinated use makes the
   definition of new status codes more difficult over the lifetime of
   HTTP, which (hopefully) is a potentially very long period of time.

2.  IANA Considerations

   This document updates the following entry in the Hypertext Transfer
   Protocol (HTTP) Status Code Registry:

   o  Value: 418

   o  Description: Reserved

   o  Reference: [this document]

   IANA should also typographically distinguish "Unassigned" and
   "Reserved" in the registry descriptions, to prevent confusion.

3.  Security Considerations

   This document has no security content.

4.  Informative References

   [RFC2324]  Masinter, L., "Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol
              (HTCPCP/1.0)", RFC 2324, DOI 10.17487/RFC2324, April 1998,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2324>.

Author's Address

   Mark Nottingham

   Email: mnot@mnot.net
   URI:   https://www.mnot.net/















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