[whatwg] new idea for web browser standard

[Ryan Johnson]

I might be misguided, but I believe that PHP has "transparent" session 
tracking using only URLs. I have no idea how it hides it from the 
browser, but from my experience it seems to work pretty damn well, and 
without cookies... I believe that would be the job of the web server 
though, and not the markup language. Can anyone shed a little more 
light on this? - Ryan

On Jul 2, 2004, at 9:26 AM, Joshua Bauguss wrote:

> 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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