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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.
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