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46 lines
2.1 KiB
Plaintext
46 lines
2.1 KiB
Plaintext
2010/08/31 - HTTP Cookies - Theory and reality
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HTTP cookies are not uniformly supported across browsers, which makes it very
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hard to build a widely compatible implementation. At least four conflicting
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documents exist to describe how cookies should be handled, and browsers
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generally don't respect any but a sensibly selected mix of them :
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- Netscape's original spec (also mirrored at Curl's site among others) :
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http://web.archive.org/web/20070805052634/http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html
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http://curl.haxx.se/rfc/cookie_spec.html
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Issues: uses an unquoted "Expires" field that includes a comma.
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- RFC 2109 :
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http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2109.txt
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Issues: specifies use of "Max-Age" (not universally implemented) and does
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not talk about "Expires" (generally supported). References quoted
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strings, not generally supported (eg: MSIE). Stricter than browsers
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about domains. Ambiguous about allowed spaces in values and attrs.
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- RFC 2965 :
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http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2965.txt
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Issues: same as RFC2109 + describes Set-Cookie2 which only Opera supports.
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- Current internet draft :
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https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/httpstate/charter/
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Issues: as of -p10, does not explain how the Set-Cookie2 header must be
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emitted/handled, while suggesting a stricter approach for Cookie.
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Documents reality and as such reintroduces the widely used unquoted
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"Expires" attribute with its error-prone syntax. States that a
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server should not emit more than one cookie per Set-Cookie header,
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which is incompatible with HTTP which says that multiple headers
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are allowed only if they can be folded.
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See also the following URL for a browser * feature matrix :
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http://code.google.com/p/browsersec/wiki/Part2#Same-origin_policy_for_cookies
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In short, MSIE and Safari neither support quoted strings nor max-age, which
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make it mandatory to continue to send an unquoted Expires value (maybe the
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day of week could be omitted though). Only Safari supports comma-separated
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lists of Set-Cookie headers. Support for cross-domains is not uniform either.
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