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The big use of cookies for re-authentication and carrying around a session id enabled clean URLs lacking your session id as a query param, but it wouldn't be th

by Jach 8y ago

The big use of cookies for re-authentication and carrying around a session id enabled clean URLs lacking your session id as a query param, but it wouldn't be that big of a deal to lose it. You'd need to be careful with copy-pasting URLs -- but given browsers standardized on cookies they could have standardized on a sessionId param name to filter out of copy-pastes or not even display it at all similar to Chrome's proposal to not display the protocol, just a "secure" flag or not. A similar "session context established" flag could have been made. And in the age of password managers and/or having your browser remember your login, it wouldn't be that much of a loss to require logging in to everything again every time you restart your browser... maybe more of a pain with 2FA. I don't really see it as "what we couldn't do" but "what poor usability we have overcome". I'm glad we have cookies and other forms of local storage, especially for the latter there are many other benefits. Maybe one day we'll get Web SQL. In the meantime people can still disable cookies entirely, or at least delete them when they close the browser, both with out of the box browser settings (and I have no idea what extensions are available to do even more) and return to that less-usable (if slightly more private) experience. The crucial idea of a "user agent" is I think the biggest mindset change the web brought, it's important to keep that even if on the dev side we constantly complain about being asked to support more than one configuration of anything.

duxup 8y ago
>I don't really see it as "what we couldn't do" but "what poor usability we have overcome". I'm glad we have cookies and other forms of local storage, especially for the latter there are many other benefits. Maybe one day we'll get Web SQL. Yeah I think that's accurate. It's a little weird sometimes reading all these articles about cookies, JavaScript, etc and I always think "But I use those things to ... give people things, convenience, data, help them do things." But so many times it's not treated as a tool, it's almost implied to be a negative thing.
- mikeash 8y ago
  90% of web developers give the rest of you a bad name.
  - duxup 8y ago
    I really wonder if it is more 90% of really visible things give a bad name. Most just do stuff nobody sees at any volume.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      That’s a good point. One bad web developer at, say, Facebook cancels out millions of people working on less visible stuff.
- rhizome 8y ago
  give people things, convenience, data, help them do things Have you ever reviewed how little you need in order to do all those things, outside of third-party dependencies? Any second guesses at all?
  - duxup 8y ago
    I don't know what you mean exactly.
kansface 8y ago
This will work until the EU in decides you must ask the user permission before you can change the query string. Technology was not the cause of this problem and it won't be the solution.

by Jach 8y ago

duxup 8y ago

>I don't really see it as "what we couldn't do" but "what poor usability we have overcome". I'm glad we have cookies and other forms of local storage, especially for the latter there are many other benefits. Maybe one day we'll get Web SQL. Yeah I think that's accurate. It's a little weird sometimes reading all these articles about cookies, JavaScript, etc and I always think "But I use those things to ... give people things, convenience, data, help them do things." But so many times it's not treated as a tool, it's almost implied to be a negative thing.

mikeash 8y ago
90% of web developers give the rest of you a bad name.
- duxup 8y ago
  I really wonder if it is more 90% of really visible things give a bad name. Most just do stuff nobody sees at any volume.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    That’s a good point. One bad web developer at, say, Facebook cancels out millions of people working on less visible stuff.
rhizome 8y ago
give people things, convenience, data, help them do things Have you ever reviewed how little you need in order to do all those things, outside of third-party dependencies? Any second guesses at all?
- duxup 8y ago
  I don't know what you mean exactly.

kansface 8y ago

This will work until the EU in decides you must ask the user permission before you can change the query string. Technology was not the cause of this problem and it won't be the solution.