Re: LYNX-DEV Cookies

[Andrew Kuchling]

I've implemented shopping carts and things for commercial sites;
without cookies, you have to maintain state via a session ID
explicitly kept in the current URL.  This means you have to run every
page through some sort of CGI script (which is slow), and accessing a
single static page causes the browser to lose the session ID.  Cookies
are an excellent solution to this, but they're a useful technology
that's getting a bad name.  

Netscape 4.0 has expanded cookie handling options: accept all cookies,
accept no cookies, and accept only cookies from the same server as the
page being viewed.  This last option will ignore cookies from ads
embedded in a page, but accessed from a different server such as
doubleclick.com.

Unfortunately, I fear most people will simply disable all cookies and
forget it.  This is bad for Lynx users; cookies are easy to implement,
and it's easy to write shopping carts or whatever with them, so it's
not hard to produce sites that work with Lynx.  However, if many
people disable cookies completely, then commercial design firms will
resort to other methods; we've already done sites which are completely
unnavigable if you don't have JavaScript or Java.  It'll be a lot
harder to add JavaScript to Lynx than it was to add cookies, so these
sites will remain inaccessible for a long time to come...

More Netscape fun: the release notes for 4.01b6 for Unix platforms
includes the following entries:

     * Visiting certain pages with frames might cause your system to halt.
     * The ALT attribute for an image does not work correctly.
     * The HTML tag, &lt is not converted to a < (less than) symbol.

Ooh, I guess they're leaving the hard problems for last...


        Andrew Kuchling
        address@hidden
        http://people.magnet.com/%7Eamk/



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