[moe]

No, servers should hold _all the state_ and clients none.

That's the opposite of the general consensus in the webdev-community.

Client-state is not only vastly more efficient in many cases but it also usually leads to cleaner designs and easier scaling.

Many of the modern desktop-like webapps would be outright infeasible without client-state. What's your response to that, should we just refrain from making such apps in the browser?

If I add something to my shopping basket from my mobile phone, I want to be able to add more from my browser

And at the same time you probably appreciate when on your slow mobile-link the "add-basket" operation happens asynchronously, yet doesn't get lost when you refresh the page at the wrong moment.

I'm a bit confused here. You know better than most how critical latency is to the user-experience. Saving on server-roundtrips or hiding them is a big deal.

Yet you promote this dogma without providing an alternative solution to this dilemma.

[phkamp]

Cleaner for who ? Easier for who ?

That kind of cookie usage just makes it Somebody Else's Problem instead of your problem.

[moe]

Cleaner for who ? Easier for who ?

For the webapp-developer, which results in a faster and cheaper experience for the user.

I'm still baffled at your persistence given you sit pretty much at the source. You have probably written VCLs for sticky sessions yourself and pondered the constraints wrt data-locality and single points of failure? Sticky sessions are just not a good design when the alternative is so readily available; it's the first time in a long time I hear anyone disagree with that.

That kind of cookie usage just makes it Somebody Else's Problem instead of your problem.

And who would that "somebody else" be?

Users certainly don't care about a few hundred extra-bytes that their browser sends with each request, especially since that trade-off usually makes their browsing faster than the alternative would be.

The privacy concern is valid but boils down to developers using cookies wrong (without encryption). If we were to remove all technologies that are used wrong by incompetent developers then the internet would be a pretty empty place.