Friday, 14 October 2011

Who am I talking to?

Given that it is the end of the week, here a little exercise to test your information retrieval skills: You remember that a web server returns a status code as the first element of a reply to your browser. The most common ones are 200 (OK) or 404 (Not found - if there is nothing at the address you were looking). Now, in what situation would you encounter a status code of 418?
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4 comments:

  1. Sam Murphy17 October 2011 at 14:19

    Apparently according to Wikipedia this status means 'Im a Teapot' and it has never been used but was an April Fools in 1998.

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  2. Oliver Mason18 October 2011 at 11:42

    Yes, correct! It does indeed mean that you're trying to connect to a teapot using the http protocol. Now, bonus points for the follow-up question: the 4xx codes signify errors, so why is "I'm a teapot" seen as an error condition?

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  3. Sam Murphy18 October 2011 at 21:11

    I don't think i know this one but is it because the code doesn't believe it is a real person to send information to and therefore believes it to be an error.

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  4. Oliver Mason19 October 2011 at 09:10

    It's part of a (joke) protocol to communicate with a coffee machine - and of course, it is then an error if you are actually addressing a teapot! Nice example of geek humour, I think...

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