Re: Handling Cookies is a Minefield

Hi, folks

Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu> wrote:
> The only way to fix cookies is to gain
> adoption, and for this, a new specification must offer some convenience
> to application developers.

As the (now-retired) co-author of RFC 2109 and RFC 2965, I hesitate to 
jump into the cookie specification discussion after all these years. Let 
me point you to some history, if you're interested:  "HTTP Cookies: 
Standards, Privacy, and Politics" (<https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0105018>) 
from 2001.  It might be helpful to avoid repeating history or past 
mistakes.  We are approaching 30 years since Netscape first introduced 
cookies.

It would be appealing to write a "clean slate" specification that solved 
all the known problems.  However, introducing a new standard will not 
solve the interoperability problem, because there's an extensive base of 
legacy software.  This was true even back in 2000 when we tried to find 
a way to reconcile the few implementations that existed then.  We 
considered and rejected a "clean slate" specification then.

Dave Kristol

Received on Wednesday, 4 December 2024 21:29:19 UTC