[whatwg] new idea for web browser standard
Joshua Bauguss
josh at bauguss.net
Fri Jul 2 09:26:33 PDT 2004
Hi. I'm an e-commerce developer for a couple web sites. We have long
been bugged about the whole issue with session ids. It seems that too
many of our visitors are simply turning things like Javascript and
Cookies off. Javascript we can live without. Cookies is another
issue. So we developed the system to not rely on cookies. Now wherever
you go on our site, a session id follows you via the url. While this
seems to work, it just isn't pretty. I've checked out Amazon and a few
others and they use the same technique.
So I got to thinking, what if it was the browser's job to provide a web
site with a valid session id. One that the site's server had no control
over. The browser could generate a unique id based on the url and a
keyphrase that gets setup when the browser is installed. Then site
developers could use it if they needed. What I think is nice about this
is that the browser would provide a unique id for Amazon, google, etc.
The cookie problem goes away (where sites track you from site to site)
and ugly urls become a thing of the past. The browser could also do
further checks as in only providing the url it is visiting with a
session id and not that damn tracking graphic installed on some sites
from doubleclick or whatever is the current "bad guy". (you know, the
reason people stopped trusting cookies to begin with)
I really think this is a great idea and could work. I also think it
would be really easy for a browser to implement. What do you think?
Josh Bauguss
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