Re: lynx-dev [dev17 patch] cookie options documentation

[Klaus Weide]

On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, brian j pardy wrote:

> On Boomtime, the 52nd of Chaos, 3165, David Woolley wrote:
> > > ! # COOKIE_ACCEPT_DOMAINS and COOKIE_REJECT_DOMAINS are comma-delimited 
> > > lists of
> > 
> > I don't generally have a problem accepting session cookies, but there only
> > a very few sites (Microsoft, basically) where I reluctantly accept 
> > persistent cookies.  Some sites use a mix of both and won't work without
> > the session cookies (it's a hassle having to inspect every cookie on a GUI
> > browser).
> > 
> > For my purposes, these two options are not enough, and I would have to
> > continue to manually check cookies.  I'd need the ability to selectively
> > accept session cookies for this to be useful.
> 
> I'm a little wary of adding yet another option for this (do we really
> need more options for cookies than for HTML parsing?)

Although that may at first seem strange, it isn't necessarily: Everyone
who uses Lynx wants HTML parsing; not everyone wants cookies, some want
some cookies, getting cookies wrong has potentially worse results (sending
personal info where it shouldn't be sent) than getting parsing wrong.

> , but I think it
> would be a pretty minimal thing to do. 
> 
> Does anyone else think this would be a useful thing?

It is not clear to me what kind of configuration option(s) *would* be
useful for David (although I could guess).  I sugesst he should specify
what would work for him.

For one thing, I don't even know that there is a clear definition of
what a "session cookie" is.   The simple definition is probably "a cookie
without an expiration date", but that would exclude e.g. cookies with
expiration in the past.  And cookies with expiration date can replace
cookies without (and vice versa).

    Klaus