daily knowledge: the Internet Engineering Task Force, or the IETF, is the governing body that standardizes all sorts of technologies and protocols used across the entire internet. this work is done by Working Groups, and HTTP, being the protocol the web is built on, has a Working Group run by the IETF to lead its development. this group's chairman is Mark Nottingham, who in 2017, requested that the "418: I'm a Teapot" status code be removed from multiple popular programming languages that implemented it in their HTTP libraries. the argument was that, since the official specification for HTTP had left "418" unassigned at this time, that languages shouldn't go using it willy nilly, since it could be officially assigned to something at a later point.

however, this was not enough for the 15 year old programmer Shane Brunswick, who soon created a site called "save418.com" to campaign in favor of the Teapot status code's existence. he argued that it was "a reminder that the underlying processes of computers are still made by humans." after the campaign trended across reddit and twitter, the programming languages that implemented it kept their implementations, and before long, Notthingham changed course and published a proposal to officially reserve the 418 status code. today, IANA's registry of status codes specifically marks 418 as "unused," rather than unassigned, allowing the "I'm a Teapot" response to be implemented without violating the HTTP spec, and perhaps even moreso than the implementations that sparked this debate, serving as a reminder of the human processes that guide technological development.