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by jimktrains2 4144 days ago
Which is why, as a tech community, we should have attempted to come up with a better solution. A session identifier controlled by the client (Say, just a UUID and can store no data from the server) and with the associated UI to cleaning "logout" or "reset" a session with a website, may have alleviated privacy concerns without breaking the functionality we originally were looking to add to HTTP.

Yes, this would not have been able to be rolled out to everyone immediately, but neither is any other addition to JS, HTTP, HTML, CSS, &c. We should help build the future, not simply accommodate the past all the time.

1 comments

Considering (relative to now) cookies were added really early on... it would have made sense to have a user/browser token that was only available to a single site, with a reset option.

Another thing that's a little irksome is that nobody uses http auth, because there's no easy logout option.

I will say I do like parts of http/2 being there... I think that dnssec + tls should have been part of the official mix. At the very least CA pricing has fallen into a reasonable range (about $10/month) for wildcard certs. Another thing that took too long is SNI.

Overall though, I think people have gotten pretty spoiled when it comes to technology (myself included)... OMG it takes a whole second and a half between clicking login and being able to see my bank statement. I remember when it was 15-seconds... I think everyone should experience a modem ANSI interface at 9600bps... (not just because I still like BBSes and ANSI art).

I 100% agree with you on the auth part. Mutual auth via something like SRP built into the browser would be a huge boon to building web sites that don't have to handle the plain-text password. Some nice chrome on that, or even an interface with HTML (<form method="mutal-auth-login"> <form method="mutal-auth-logout"> or something) would be super nice.

> OMG it takes a whole second and a half between clicking login and being able to see my bank statement. I remember when it was 15-seconds

What's worse is that people seem to get offended when you say "I have a crappy computer and a crappy connection, this is too bloated". I actually started running noscript soley to block analytics and ads that causing page rendering to delay for 10+s. I had the page. It was all there, but the browser had to wait for all resources before it'd do a full render. All of that immediately stopped with noscript.