I wish instead of a protocol improvement that focused solely on network resources, the next version will also include improvements for users such as encryption by default and doing away with cookies.
It's unfortunate that TLS ended up being optional in HTTP/2, but if the big browsers only support HTTP/2 over TLS (as FF/Chrome have said they will do) then we might see very little non-TLS deployment.
You can begin today to do away with cookies on your own sites and services. Start implementing richer clients and leveraging Open ID Connect and OAuth2.
Cookies solve real use case problems. Unless we all start building and experiencing and improving the alternatives, progress won't be made.
That said, good luck on getting rid of cookies all together.
Excuse my ignorance, but how can I do session management without using cookies?
I tried searching on the net, but it doesn't seem to give any concrete/valid results.
Can you give me any pointers?
Edit: I do use OAuth2.0 on my services and use Mozilla Persona to manage user logins, but I am not clear how can I keep sessions between requests if I don't use cookies.
You can carry the session ID in the URL. This also has the benefit of eliminating XSRF. The downside is that you have a horrendous URL if that type if thing bothers you, and you can't have a "remember me" check box in your login.
This approach has some massive downsides - the session ID is sent via Referer to outbound links, URLs are logged all over the place (including browser histories), it's easy for people to publicly share it without thinking which then ends up in Google as well...
"Applications" on the web are inherently dependant on JavaScript and most often XHR too, but I do agree that using Local Storage has little to no advantage over Cookies.
Then we clearly have different definition of "application".
For me, an web application runs in the browser, not merely exposes an API over HTTP that can be used by HTML from a browser.
Yeah, him and every other user that includes basic features like "when I select the first step in a sequence of steps, the UI immediately responds instead of waiting several hundred ms to fetch an entirely new set of markup".
Every time I use Tor, I appreciate your viewpoint. But trying to pretend that most developers are better off spending their time maintaining a separate renderer for a few edge case users is not really reflective of reality.
Absolutely. I'm sick and tired of idiot developers fucking up the web with their bullshit "apps" which are slow, crash all the time, and break everything.
I've worked on more "web apps" than I can count and the reality is, only 2 of them were legitimate use cases for a pure JS solution. And we gain nothing from it. I've just spent all morning debugging an issue with a complicated angular directive (and not for the first time) that would have been a few lines of jquery a couple of years ago. Probably because a bored dev wanted to play with a new toy.
As you imply, we were writing sophisticated web apps long before AJAX was popularised and those apps were way more reliable and predictable than what we have now, and they worked in Lynx if you wanted.
Even in 1999, using JavaScript to make far more usable UIs was common. While I'm not a fan of these bloated apps that need a couple megs of stuff just to render some basic looking page, let's not pretend that requiring user action and a full round trip to render even the smallest change was some golden era.
>that would have been a few lines of jquery a couple of years ago
I agree with you completely. Cookies are an older technology and is well supported in all kinds of browser. Plus it does the client side of session management for you(sending the tokens on every request). Localstorage is newer technology and might not be feasible in all situations. Plus JS+XHR are also not available to all kinds of users. (People using Tor, NoScript etc).
Also, I don't see the advantage of storing session/auth tokens in localstorage over cookies. Both are stored in plain text, and can be read if somehow it is obtained. Also, using localstorage means writing your own client-side implementation of doing the session management.
I also don't see the advantage of using session tokens in URLs. Anyway cookies are included as part of header of the HTTP request, you don't have to have your application send session trackers. I think both are functionally same and the tokens in URLs just does not look good!
And public/private key-based signing system is still not there yet, unless we simplify some UX issues about having private/public keys for every user, we are not getting there.
So, it looks like, to me, there is no really effective alternative for doing sessions apart from cookies (even in HTTP/2)?!
Maybe you can get around not using cookies for an AJAX application that keeps a constant connection open. But for the other 99% of the web, you still need cookies to get the statefullness required for any kind of authentication or tracking.
Cookies aren't auth tokens anyway, just session trackers.
Theoretically, we could move to a private key based system, where your browser encrypts/signs with a private key for each site, but there's neither the will to do it, nor the means to make it simple for the room temperature IQs. Shame, as the privacy and security benefits would be amazing.
This could be done today with TLS Client Certificates. There is already browser support (through either <KeyGen /> or the MS alternative, which is an API rather than an element, I believe) for creating a private/public key pair, and sending the public key to the server.
Unfortunately it's not fantastically simple to move to a new device (particularly not a mobile device where client certs are even harder to install)
