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by togakangaroo 676 days ago
Author of the post here,

There was no form submission, I'm not sure where you got that. There was also no POST. Though yes, I agree that in the core HTTP semantic, you wouldn't want to change state on a GET and that should include not calling `Set-Cookie`. And yet the reality is that that nearly every application - and many popular libraries like auth0 - do in fact set and clear cookies on `GET`.

The issue here was that the `Link` component in NextJs

- does preloading by default (which is a bad idea exactly for the above reason of reality being different from theory)

- doesn't do preloading by default when running on the dev server (so you don't see the error until its deployed)

- because it does preloading directly in javascript, it can't possibly follow the HTTP semantic of not actually applying cookies until later when the cached route is used

Everything else was the wild goose chase bits.

Also I asked claude to criticize the article as a web forum might before publishing, and this is definitely the tone it gave :D

Oh, also, I'm pretty sure I got the part wrong where i was talking about the preload attribute in HTML, but so far no one's noticed. I should correct that.

3 comments

> There was no form submission, I'm not sure where you got that. There was also no POST.

OP was saying the logout function should have been behind a form submission / POST.

Ah, yes, I mean, agree that would have been technically correct, but like I said, its just not how a lot of the web works. auth0-nextjs seems to react to `GET` by default (though it might also work with `POST` and you certainly can override things)
So OP was correct that a proper use of the foundational layer of HTTP would have saved time, yours in particular, right?

Also, I didn’t get your ”Claude predicted your tone smiley” thing. OP tone seemed polite and clear. Your tone, on the other hand, seemed defensive and dismissive. Even after you realizing that you initially misunderstood what OP said, adding a “I mean” and a “but I like I said” to reinforce you were right even while misreading what OP said (rather than just acknowledging you got it wrong in the first reading).

I would go even further and speculate that you were predisposed to get a dismissive tone from a web forum (your previous Claude test suggests that) so much that you got a perfectly fine comment and misread in a way that it felt in the “wrong tone” to you. Even misunderstanding what the post said. All of that to confirm your predisposition.

I think I left my context collapse a little here. The article had gotten really good feedback when I passed it around in the various communities I'm in, but I hadn't written it with the idea of the broader hackersphere in mind. I did post the story to here, but I didn't really think it would get traction. I should have done some double-checking and added caveats and context beforehand.

My comment about Claude was simply intended to giggle at how much it has us pegged, not to call out the op directly.

It's well beyond "technically correct", especially for the web. The "safe methods" section is quite explicit about that:

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7231#section-4.2.1

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110#name-safe-methods

By electing to actionably mutate state on GET, one subscribes themselves to a world of hurt.

It is totally how the web works, both as defined by HTTP and in practice. Surely one can pile a dozen workarounds to circumvent the GET safety definition, but then it's just flat out simpler to have it be a POST or DELETE and work as intended.

That a lot of people are doing it a certain - broken - way certainly does not mean they are right.

That would also have been practically correct, avoiding you this bug and the many hours of debugging, being resilient to byzantine/adversarial technologies (NextJS reimplementing prefetching itself and making debugging very difficult)
"because it does preloading directly in javascript, it can't possibly follow the HTTP semantic of not actually applying cookies until later when the cached route is used"

I may be wrong, but I don't think using JavaScript vs using the standard HTML <link> element to prefetch makes a difference here. I don't see anything in the HTML specs about preload or prefetch delaying cookie setting to sometime after the resource is actually loaded (although admittedly I find this bit of the spec somewhat hard to read, as it's dense with references to other parts of the spec). I tried it out, and, both Firefox and Chrome set the cookies for preloaded and prefetched links when the resource is loaded, even if the resource is never actually used.

> Also I asked claude to criticize the article as a web forum might before publishing, and this is definitely the tone it gave :D

Come on.