No Cookie: how to implement session?

[Paul Rubin]

Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> writes:
> 	Do we have the same dictionary?
> 
> 	Ephemeral, as in "mayflies are ephemeral", means "of short life"...
> A cookie with a built-in expiration would, to my mind, be "ephemeral"

Ephemeral cookies in web-head jargon are cookies with no specified
expiration date, so they go away when you close the browser.  Cookies
with expiration dates persist until that date (which admittedly might
be just a few seconds away but usually is much longer) if the server
side programmer gets what s/he wants.  Usually, the expiration date is
WAY in the future, i.e. the server is either trying to set a
persistent login credential (ok, if the user wants it) or is trying to
do invasive user tracking (not good: see the recent news stories about
the court case around the US government trying to get Google search
logs, and then remember that Google sets a cookie that tries to
correlate all of any user's searches with each other).

> 	Firefox control has: 
> 
> 	Keep cookies:	until they expire
> 					until I close Firefox

Yes, it took a very long time to get some browser to implement it.
There's a huge and hairy thread about it in bugzilla.mozilla.com
somewhere asking why Communicator didn't do it.