When they get an unexpected cat (or dog, in this case) they tend to go and ask their tech team, "what's with the cat?" It's not a substitute for good logging and alerting in any way, and is totally unsuitable for environments where internal tools need to appear professional and sensible, but as a way to get people to pay attention when something goes wrong then a cute animal can work a lot better than a "normal" notification.
!http 422https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...
Interestingly this TLD only allows website that "to serve the needs of the Catalan Linguistic and Cultural Community on the Internet"[2] which is why http.cat also offers a Catalan version[3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom... [2] https://domini.cat/en/rules-of-the-cat-domain/ [3] https://http.cat/?lang=cat
I think that's the point and it's a nice throwback :)
But otherwise I agree, https://http.cat/ is far more harmless. Some of those dog pictures would probably not fare well when a less humorous colleague sees them.
An Error 500 page used in an internal service could tell you something like "Try again in 5 minutes, and call Joe if it still doesn't work".
An Error 410 page can spell out "We used to have this, but don't anymore because it was obsolete. Please look here for a replacement instead."
The defaults are just that, simple defaults, and these days typically overriden by the web browser to show something more user friendly.
Of course it doesn’t stop you from rendering a nice and plainly worded error.
All the April Fools RFCs are worth a read imho [2]. RFC2100 (The Naming of Hosts) and RFC8135 (Complex Addressing in IPv6) are real gems.
1: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for...
I myself use 418 as a reply to mean bots. Fun + makes filtering logs easier.
Nginx config snippet:
# Nothing to hack around here, I’m just a teapot:
location ~* \.(?:php|aspx?|jsp|dll|sql|bak)$ {
return 418;
}
error_page 418 /418.html;
You can optimize these a bit more using the Kraken.io web interface: https://kraken.io/web-interface
Tried with a few and it shrinks them down ten to 20 percent savings without losing quality.
