Dear lynx-developers
I have been developing a network application, TomsoftDiarySystem
(http://www.morito.mgmt.waseda.ac.jp/~tom/TomSoft/TsDiary/).
It outputs the cookies whose path is the same as request-uri, that is,
uri=/bar/diary/ and path=/bar/diary/.
I found that lynx warns "invalid cookie path" for the cookies.
According to RFC 2965(RFC 2109) and RFC 2964,
I believe these RFCs do not regard the cookies as "invalid" ones.
I referred to the articles of lynx-dev ML in order to make the reason clear
why lynx regards the cookies as "invalid", and I found the article,
http://www.flora.org/lynx-dev/html/month081999/msg00254.html.
In this article, it seems that "prefix" does not contain uri itself.
However, I have a different opinion based on RFC 2965.
RFC 2965 says
A user agent rejects (SHALL NOT store its information) if the Version
attribute is missing. Moreover, a user agent rejects (SHALL NOT
store its information) if any of the following is true of the
attributes explicitly present in the Set-Cookie2 response header:
* The value for the Path attribute is not a prefix of the
request-URI.
and adding to it,
For two strings that represent paths, P1 and P2, P1 path-matches P2
if P2 is a prefix of P1 (including the case where P1 and P2 string-
compare equal). Thus, the string /tec/waldo path-matches /tec.
In my opinion, these sentences should be interpreted that "prefix" can
contain
uri itself, therefore, the cookies mentioned the above should be valid.
Although obsolete RFC 2109 did not define the meaning of "prefix" clearly,
RFC 2965 clearly mentioned a uri itself can be its prefix.
I hope that lynx accepts a cookie whose path is the same as its uri
without any warning like "invalid cookie path."
Scenery,
--
tom TANAKA Tomonari
address@hidden
http://www.morito.mgmt.waseda.ac.jp/~tom/