[whatwg] Suggestion: API for accessing cookies (document.cookies)
Ian Hickson
ian at hixie.ch
Fri Feb 8 21:00:43 PST 2008
On Fri, 28 Dec 2007, Christian Schmidt wrote:
>
> In order to read, write and delete cookies from script most people use
> their own utility functions like the ones shown at
> http://www.w3schools.com/js/js_cookies.asp
Indeed. I think though that at this point this is well enough understood
that it's not really worth changing the API -- people will have to support
the old one for years anyway.
> It would be useful if cookies could be read, written and deleted through
> a more abstract API, e.g. by an HTMLCollection-like interface stored in
> document.cookies. This would allow something like this:
>
> if (document.cookies.myCookie) {
> alert(document.cookies.myCookie.value)
>
> document.cookies.remove('myCookie');
> // or alternatively
> document.cookies.myCookie.remove();
>
> document.cookies.add('myCookie2', 'myVal', '/', 'example.org');
> }
>
> In particular the remove() method would be useful, because today neither
> the client-side nor the server-side can determine the path and domain
> parameters necessary to delete a given cookie unless they know how it
> was originally set.
>
> The API could give access to the values only or possibly also to the
> other properties (expiry, path etc.) that are currenly not accessible
> from neither client-side nor server-side.
Well, the DOM storage API and the SQL APIs provide a better API than
cookies, but of course that data isn't sent over the network. A library
could be made to interface them, though.
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
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