what is an HTTP code?

The internet is built upon humanities best tool, standard. And a lot of then for that matter. And one of those very important standards are HTTP response codes. If you have ever tried to navigate to a webpage that didn't exist, you have seen the HTTP code 404 - Not Found. There are plenty more liked this, used in the background to allow your computer and the website to communicate the status. Examples being 500 - Sever error, 200 - OK, and more.

april fools

So where does this get interesting? Programmers are a humorous bunch, usually laughing at their own jokes. On April 1, 1998, then Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP) was released, a full standard for how a server that is a coffee pot should conduct it self. As part of this (extended in 2014), a response code, 418, was officially added in an RFC. Code 418 waas the response to be given if a server was a teapot, and therefore could not brew coffee. Obviously, this was all a joke, but since it is a fully legitimate reserved code, some website return this occasionally as a joke.

other interesting codes

There are some other interesting codes. I find code 451 quite interesting, the code for "restricted for legal reasons". This code was chosen in name of Ray Bradbury's Book Fahrenheit 451 — a book all about government censorship. It is used often today when a website can't or doesn't want to serve a particular client because of legal reasons, such as GDPR. Code 402 is also interesting, "payment required", a code that is largely unused right now (but that might change soon!). There are plenty of more numbers to make codes out of, so who knows, we could get some new codes soon!