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-rw-r--r-- | doc/internals/http-cookies.txt | 45 |
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diff --git a/doc/internals/http-cookies.txt b/doc/internals/http-cookies.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6d65c54 --- /dev/null +++ b/doc/internals/http-cookies.txt @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +2010/08/31 - HTTP Cookies - Theory and reality + +HTTP cookies are not uniformly supported across browsers, which makes it very +hard to build a widely compatible implementation. At least four conflicting +documents exist to describe how cookies should be handled, and browsers +generally don't respect any but a sensibly selected mix of them : + + - Netscape's original spec (also mirrored at Curl's site among others) : + http://web.archive.org/web/20070805052634/http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html + http://curl.haxx.se/rfc/cookie_spec.html + + Issues: uses an unquoted "Expires" field that includes a comma. + + - RFC 2109 : + http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2109.txt + + Issues: specifies use of "Max-Age" (not universally implemented) and does + not talk about "Expires" (generally supported). References quoted + strings, not generally supported (eg: MSIE). Stricter than browsers + about domains. Ambiguous about allowed spaces in values and attrs. + + - RFC 2965 : + http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2965.txt + + Issues: same as RFC2109 + describes Set-Cookie2 which only Opera supports. + + - Current internet draft : + https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/httpstate/charter/ + + Issues: as of -p10, does not explain how the Set-Cookie2 header must be + emitted/handled, while suggesting a stricter approach for Cookie. + Documents reality and as such reintroduces the widely used unquoted + "Expires" attribute with its error-prone syntax. States that a + server should not emit more than one cookie per Set-Cookie header, + which is incompatible with HTTP which says that multiple headers + are allowed only if they can be folded. + +See also the following URL for a browser * feature matrix : + http://code.google.com/p/browsersec/wiki/Part2#Same-origin_policy_for_cookies + +In short, MSIE and Safari neither support quoted strings nor max-age, which +make it mandatory to continue to send an unquoted Expires value (maybe the +day of week could be omitted though). Only Safari supports comma-separated +lists of Set-Cookie headers. Support for cross-domains is not uniform either. + |