AW: [fwd] IE 6.0 and P3P Policies Problems with Cookies

Hello,

I intentionally cc: this to the list. As the list starts
to gain interest these last days, I hope that my work as
a scout the last weeks will help some of you. In turn it 
will pay off for me if some of you pick up the loose ends 
I leave here (as I have no time to go on with this cur-
rently) and tells about the results of further investi-
gations.


Hello Janice,

...
* in the commercial world IMHO the driving force is going
* to be to make sites IE6 compliant, and not P3P per se. 

Completely Agree.

* One of the applications ("ABC Ad Banner") I am working
* on potentially does not have the ability to issue compact
* headers when laying an ad on a page of a first party site.

I have seen banners from doubleclick on some Sites that
acted as third parties there and did not issue any msg.
in IE 6. Doubleclick has implemented P3P. Im going to
check this further for my own purposes. Unhappily, Im
not able to tell on which sites I saw these adds. Also,
they might not be running any longer. This was the host:

ad.uk.doubleclick.net/ad/

* Am I correct to assume this is a Large Problem?

A webserver not able to send customized headers should
be a rare thing. If this is the case, yes there are some
more steps involved like moving to apache. Its a good
time to do so anyway.

* Additionally, is anyone else aware of IE6 specific
* issues in implementing P3P??

You should browse the MS Site. P3P expects User agents
to import user preferences as XML-Files. They might also
Export them at their own decretion. In fact this means
that there could be some dialogs in an app like IE 6 
acting as GUI to create such a XML-formatted user pre-
ference.
IE 6 does not have such a thing currently. You can just
choose something like low-middle-high-extrabold (this
translated back from the german version ;-)) and import
existing user preferences as required by the standard. 
These user-prefs are what IE checks the policies of your 
Site against.
MS has published the "middle"-user pref in clear text
on their Site. The middle setting is the default setting
which most users wont ever change. This is the only way
to find out what IE 6 will accept. It is a very huge
set of rules. But it will certainly help you to find
out the reason if you Sites is still denied after 
implementing P3P-headers. Sorry, I lost the URL...

* is it known fact that IE6 does not read the XML policy
* of third parties.

Yes, I think so. This is what the docs form MS themselves
say. Actually, I can even understand their point of view.
Isnt it a little task to add the compact policy after im-
plementing P3P on a site compared to the latency all the
users would have to bear on commerical sites for fetching
the policies for each Cookie? Those offering these Sites
would even not be happy either with such a solution, I 
guess.

Bye, Christian

Received on Monday, 22 October 2001 14:16:54 UTC