Re: Removing CommentURL

"David W. Morris" <dwm@xpasc.com> wrote:
>On Fri, 25 Jul 1997, Larry Masinter wrote:
>
>> Since this argument seems to have convinced one person,
>> I thought I would make it more broadly and see if I could convince
>> someone else.
>
>The suggestion is that CommentURL won't be used much or help many
>users so it should be dropped.
>
>The fact is that there has been significant push back on even implementing
>the IETF cookie specification from the two largest UA vendors. 
>
>There  is also the reasonable hypothesis that most users will, totally
>confused by the issues and frustrated by the interruptions, simply
>enable all cookies.
>
>On the basis of lack of deployement or lack of appeal to the general
>user we should simply drop all concerns about cross domain cookies or
>drop the cookie issue with a simple RFC which overrides 2068 as not
>implementable and to be ignored.
>
>I am not advocating that approach, only noting that the same arguments
>made against the utility of CommentURL apply to the broader set of
>issues.
>
>I do seriously propose dropping the Comment attribute as so inadequate
>for its stated purpose as to be meaningless. Eliminate the confusion and
>simplify the protocol.

	I don't see why the comment attribute shouldn't be retained
for short, telegraph strings like those appended to status lines.
That could be helpful when doing a cookie cleanup, at least for
ASCII-speaking users, and the commentURL would be available for
more substantive information, hopefully with a negotiable charset
and language. 

	My thoughts on this are based on the hope that there will
be follow-through on a PEP or PEP-like extension, down the road,
which would further reduce the number of cookies about which the
user must be consulted at time of reception.
 
				Fote

=========================================================================
 Foteos Macrides            Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research
 MACRIDES@SCI.WFBR.EDU         222 Maple Avenue, Shrewsbury, MA 01545
=========================================================================

Received on Sunday, 27 July 1997 13:02:57 UTC