It appears that The Age newspaper (www.theage.com.au) is moving to a 'free subscription' based model, similar to the New York Times. However, The Age has a very interesting idea of what cookies it wishes to set.
Amongst a whole field of cookies that it tries to present, a couple of cookies are presented with a domain of '.com.au'. I'm not sure about you, but I don't feel that it's appropriate for a newspaper to try and set cookies that will be presented to every Australian business website. Even if the information inside them is not particularly private, it still makes it quite clear that the visitor is also a reader of The Age, or one of Fairfax's other publications.
Needless to say, I have my browser configured to refuse these particular cookies.
Needless to say, I have my browser configured to refuse these particular cookies.
You shouldn't need to. The cookie spec says that these cookies are invalid: Any domain that fails within one of the seven special top level domains listed below only require two periods. Any other domain requires at least three. The seven special top level domains are: "COM", "EDU", "NET", "ORG", "GOV", "MIL", and "INT".
Re:broken browser too?
pjf on 2004-06-15T10:11:52
You're absolutely right, I should not need to tell my browser to reject these cookies.
Unfortunately Mozilla 1.6 will happily accept them. A quick test after visiting The Age and then Perl Training Australia reveals that the s_eq and s_cc cookies provided by the former are presenter to the later.
W3M rejects the cookies, as does MSIE. I don't have any other browsers handy at the moment with which to test. So yes, it appears that Mozilla is doing the wrong thing.
Bad Mozilla. No cookie.
Re:Safari does, too
pjf on 2004-06-16T02:37:57
...only IE and the ancient terminal browsers meet the standards. I'd hardly call w3m an ancient terminal browser, especially given that it does image rendering and responds beautifully to mouse commands, including correctly interpreting the mouse-wheel.
It seems to be a common perception that just because a browser runs in a terminal means it's old and out-of-date. This may be the case with lynx, but w3m is in a totally different league. I wish that more terminal-based programs were as aware of graphical environments as w3m.
