Re: Some half-baked thoughts about cookies.

On Tue, 14 Aug 2018, Mike West wrote:

> https://github.com/mikewest/http-state-tokens suggests that we should 
> introduce a client-controlled, origin-bound, HTTPS-only session identifier 
> for network-level state management. And eventually deprecate cookies.

I'm thinking this suggestion will handle some cookie use cases really fine 
(login-like for example) but some others much less fine:

Imagine a site that uses a cookie (for millions of users) if they saw the 
introduction page or not and can skip showing it if the user already saw it. 
Setting a cookie "sawintro=yes" is very lightweight and easy. Each client is 
then responsible for telling the server on the next visit that it already saw 
it; cookies used for client-side state as it was meant to be. Sec-HTTP-State 
doesn't make this very easy...

So, looking into the crystal ball, won't this lead to clients using both 
cookies *and* Sec-HTTP-State ?

Then, a suggestion on terminology: The document says "browser" in eight places 
when talking about a cookie-using HTTP client. Cookies is a well used 
mechanism even for non-browser HTTP clients and I believe referring to the 
user-agent as a "browser" in a document like this is bad.

-- 

  / daniel.haxx.se

Received on Wednesday, 15 August 2018 06:02:11 UTC