1. Rationale and Scope

There is coffee all over the world. Increasingly, in a world in which computing is ubiquitous, the computists want to make coffee. Coffee brewing is an art, but the distributed intelligence of the web- connected world transcends art. Thus, there is a strong, dark, rich requirement for a protocol designed espressoly for the brewing of coffee. Coffee is brewed using coffee pots. Networked coffee pots require a control protocol if they are to be controlled.

Increasingly, home and consumer devices are being connected to the Internet. Early networking experiments demonstrated vending devices connected to the Internet for status monitoring [COKE]. One of the first remotely _operated_ machine to be hooked up to the Internet, the Internet Toaster, (controlled via SNMP) was debuted in 1990 [RFC2235].

The demand for ubiquitous appliance connectivity that is causing the consumption of the IPv4 address space. Consumers want remote control of devices such as coffee pots so that they may wake up to freshly brewed coffee, or cause coffee to be prepared at a precise time after the completion of dinner preparations.

This document specifies a Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP), which permits the full request and responses necessary to control all devices capable of making the popular caffeinated hot beverages.

HTTP 1.1 ([RFC2068]) permits the transfer of web objects from origin servers to clients. The web is world-wide. HTCPCP is based on HTTP. This is because HTTP is everywhere. It could not be so pervasive without being good. Therefore, HTTP is good. If you want good coffee, HTCPCP needs to be good. To make HTCPCP good, it is good to base HTCPCP on HTTP.

Future versions of this protocol may include extensions for espresso machines and similar devices.