[REBOL] Re: Passing a cookie back to the server
From: gjones05:mail:orion at: 10-Jun-2001 5:35
From "Scott Jones"
> > thought I had looked at all the most
> > recent additions to the http arena. I
> > guess your update came soon thereafter.
> > Shame on me for
From: "Graham Chiu"
> Actually Dec 2000.
Oh. =0
OK, so I guess it is more like what a "kind" medical school prof once told me.
He said that I had three neurons in my brain, and that one was syphilitic, the
second was neuritic, and the third that connected the other two was suffering
from Alzheimer's. Gee, that was so much fun, may I go back??
> > arena. The main (and only) advantage
> > I can think of with hacking the http
> > scheme itself is that ssl, tls, tunneling, and
> > encryption, etc, will be transparently
> > supported. Do you think that this would
> > be beneficial?
>
> Absolutely. Interestingly my recollection is
> that whenRebol was first released, 'read
> did include all the headers, but then it was
> improved and hidden from us.
I guess that progress sometimes comes at a cost. It was like I "AR" and I were
talking about last week, sometimes a simple recursive directory listing in FTP
would be nice. The advanced functionality offered by the current FTP scheme
means that one has to write a routine to get a simple listing. I am not
gripping; all in all I get more work done in REBOL than any other language.
> > person, but I, too, need them for certain sites,
> > and it would be nice if REBOL handled them
> > more transparently. I mainly am doing this
>
> I agree, and I don't understand why RT haven't
> implemented transparent cookie handling into
> core yet, unless they don't consider it a priority.
Yes, when resources are limited, one must keep the eyes on the prize.
The one recurring thought that I keep having reflects on the early days of the
Microsoft and IBM alliance on creating a next generation OS. If memory serves
(and this *is* a big if), IBM wanted to totally break with the past tradition of
MS-DOS, and Microsoft wanted to create a more gentle transition so that legacy
apps could be run until they were recoded. Ultimately, they split the
partnership with IBM going to OS2 and Microsoft going to NT and gentle updating
of MS-DOS/Windows. I think we know who won that war.
Clean breaks with the past can allow one to indulge in a totally new vision of
how the world should work. The new vision presented by REBOL makes cookies seem
rather anachronistic. A REBOL reb, by design, can allow for intelligent
statefulness, as opposed to the stateless HTTP request with the "after-thought
hack" called cookies (no insult intended; the transparency of the model of
non-linear http links makes gopher look postively brain dead, but surely Tim
Berners-Lee must recognize cookies as being a bit of a tacked on hack).
Here is where studying history sometimes pays off. It gives one insight into
the human pysche and motivations. We are reluctant to make breaks with the past
if for no other reason than loss of investment. A major infrastructure has been
built upon http's stateless model and the tacked-on cookies and sessions. A
smooth, transparent management of this historical legacy goes along way towards
acceptance, which then sets the stage for the next leap. From role-playing a
bit as Dr. Frankenstein, non-ace hacker, it seems as though cookies could be
readily integrated into the existing framework.
Did I get off topic? Not really. Nabisco has a very large interest in cookie
distribution, and your update goes a long way towards consuming those cookies
(and toasted posts).
(By the way, I assumed that they were "digestive biscuits" in NZ?? Here is where
the first-class semantic mapping puts REBOL ahead of the curve:
digestive-biscuits: :cookies ;-).
--Scott Jones
