[whatwg] HTML Cookie API

[Adam Barth]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 4:30 PM, Garrett Smith <dhtmlkitchen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 4:17 PM, Adam Barth <w3c at adambarth.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 4:03 PM, Garrett Smith <dhtmlkitchen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Instead of "array like", I would like to rather have a NamedCookieMap,
>>> which is sort of like a NamedNodeMap that the cookies can be retrieved
>>> by an item or namedItem.
>>
>> That API design assumes that there's only one cookie with a given name
>> in each cookie-string.  Unfortunately, that is not a valid assumption.
>
> That is only true in that that example assumes that each cookie is
> named. It would be entirely possible for the value to be instead a
> collection, as in:
>
> var x = document.forms[0].elements["radioName"]
>
> - and the result is that x could be either an element or a collection
> of elements.

That seems more complex than just providing a list of cookies.

>>> Where is the argument for making the API async?
>>
>> Please see the discussion earlier in this thread.
>>
> Can you be more specific? I see:
>
> | I really think the API should be asynchronous, as to avoid the mess
> | that .localStorage currently is.
>
> But I don't know if that's what you meant by "please see earlier".

I mean looking at
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2010-February/thread.html
and reading the thread rooted at
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2010-February/025300.html.
 In particular,

http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2010-February/025325.html
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2010-February/025326.html
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2010-February/025327.html
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2010-February/025331.html

Those messages also refer to thousands of messages about localStorage.
 All the synchrony issues with localStorage recur here.

>>> Cookies have been synchronous for longer than I have been writing
>>> javascript and to my knowledge, nobody has ever complained of that
>>> being a problem.
>>
>> In fact, I've heard a great many complaints about this recently
>> (particularly from Darin Fisher), which is part of what prompted me to
>> make this proposal.
>
> Is there a link to that? I missed it.

http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2010-February/025326.html

... plus personal communication.

>>> Asynchronous cookies that would mean that cookie setting tests would be harder.
>>
>> No one is suggesting removing the current document.cookie API.
>
> Nobody is suggesting you change your tires. Why bring it up?

This API does not make it any harder to test whether setting a cookie
works because you can still use whatever test you like.  If we want to
solve the problem of making cookie feature testing easier, we can do
that.

Adam