[whatwg] HTML Cookie API

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 23 Feb 2010, Adam Barth wrote:
>
> The document.cookie API is kind of terrible.  Web developers shouldn't 
> have to parse a cookie-string or prepare a properly formated 
> set-cookie-string.  Here's a proposal for an HTML cookie API that isn't 
> as terrible:
> 
> https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AZpchfQ5mBrEZGQ0cDh3YzRfMTRmdHFma21kMg&hl=en
> 
> I'd like to propose we include this API in a future version of HTML. As 
> always, feedback welcome.

The incremental benefit of this seems pretty minimal, considering that 
there are widely available libraries that provide better APIs for cookies 
already, especially since as I understand it we want to move people off 
cookies where possible. This is quite a lot of surface area (meaning 
implementation cost, testing cost, potential bugs, tutorial costs, etc), 
and introduces quite a lot of authoring complexity (e.g. having to do 
everything asynchronously), for such a minimal incremental benefit 
(responsiveness and not having to use a library once this is widely 
deployed in the browsers you care about).

All things considered, I think we should probably wait until we have 
addressed more fundamental problems with the platform before adding 
something like this.

Having said that, if browser vendors think this is something worth 
implementing today, then the above is a pretty good stand-alone spec. It 
would be reasonable IMHO for this API to be specified separately, e.g. 
through the Web Apps WG.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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