RE: Cab for mint OVL... (cookies)

["Howard Chu" <howard.chu@platinum.com>]

>
>   Just wondering about the use of cookies. I've read about them and under
>   stand them (a little), but as an Atari user, are they any use to us? I
>   have CAB and the Mint for Cab overlay set to ask me but should I accept
>   them/reject them, or does it make any difference whatsoever? Thanks! ;-)
>
Judging from your question, I guess you don't understand enough
about what cookies are for. That's OK, the HTTP implementors who
came up with the silly idea in the first place weren't exactly
sure what they were for either...

The basic idea/need/motivation behind cookies arises from a flaw
in the original HTTP spec which made HTTP a totally stateless
system, where you used one new network connection for each HTTP
request. In this setup, an HTTP server can never tell if an incoming
client connection is from a brand new client, or from one that has
been merrily conversing for a long time already. This is obviously
a bad thing because there are so many useful things you'd like to
be able to do, that require a server to keep track - to keep the notion
of a "session" handy. Cookies were invented to allow web servers to
assign identifying information to a client, so that the next time
the client connected to the server, the server would know it was the
same as one from a previous connection.

So, to answer you're main question - "should I accept/reject them?" -
that's a judgement call you have to decide on an individual server
by server basis. Do you want this server to automatically recognize
you every time you connect to it again from now till the end of time?
Sometimes this is a good thing, sometimes not.

Also, in the last implementation I created, I never actually wrote
cookies out to a disk file, so they aren't even very long-lived. As
soon as you exit CAB, the cookies disintegrate. This sort of makes
them not very useful - at least, you don't have the ability to keep
session info alive over very long time spans. But if you do a lot of
repeat visits to some number of web servers within a single CAB
session, then they serve some small purpose.

In the grand scheme of things, it would be most useful to have
permanent storage for cookies, with some simple management mechanism
to handle expiration, manual removal, etc...

In the general sense "As an Atari user" is not a meaningful qualification -
cookies can be useful regardless of the platform your web client is on.
In the specific case, since the permanent storage aspect isn't implemented,
on, I guess they're not amazingly useful to you...