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The current state of the web is the result of too many cooks in the kitchen. Nobody is ever willing to stand up and say no to countless new additions that often simply replicate old behavior, or don't add anything compelling or likely to ever be used by others. We even have outright gags in the official specs, like the 418 response.

It's already too late to make HTTP something sane. What we need are developers who understand and appreciate simplicity and minimalism, to make something awesome with a chance of actually catching on. (Please don't xkcd/927 me.) And they'll have to be fierce in protecting it against third-party extensions (which may not even be possible with something this popular.)

That's unlikely to happen, so I guess we'll just keep playing this perverted game of Jenga ad infinitum.



Ha, I had to look up 418.

418 I'm a teapot (RFC 2324) This code was defined in 1998 as one of the traditional IETF April Fools' jokes, in RFC 2324, Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, and is not expected to be implemented by actual HTTP servers.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324


Sorta related, The HTTP2 Error Code of ENHANCE_YOUR_CALM strikes me as a joke because of the name...

http://http2.github.io/http2-spec/index.html#ErrorCodes

A quick Google shows that it's previously just been used by Twitter to demonstrate rate limiting.


You might also appreciate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPoAC




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