Even if they don’t know about HTTP status codes, most folks know that a “404 error” means “page not found.”

Lesser known is the 418 status, meaning “I’m a teapot” (in response to a request to brew coffee).

Today, I stumbled across a somewhat legitimate use for it. Not an actual internet connected teapot (though that would be awesome), but someone using it in the spirit of “This server can’t do what you’re asking, but another might be able to. (It’s a hack, but not an unreasonable one.)

The 418 “I’m a teapot” status code itself started off as an April Fool’s joke in RFC 2324, the “Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol”. Rather than badly summarizing it myself, I’ll refer you to Wikipedia’s Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol article which details not only the origins of the protocol, but also the story of how the “I’m a teapot” status code became an official part of the HTTP specification and is baked in to a number of mainstream HTTP frameworks.

(Header image by A.cilia, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)