[Web-SIG] Client-side support: what are we aiming for?

[Ian Bicking]

On Thursday, October 23, 2003, at 07:46 PM, John J Lee wrote:
> I've been working on that kind of stuff.
>
> http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/
>
> I certainly think automatic cookie handling would be appropriate for 
> the
> std lib.  I've written code to do that (based on a port from 
> libwww-perl,
> but substantially changed since then), which is already integrated into
> urllib2 (albeit ATM including a lot of junk for backwards-compatibility
> and some cut-n-pasting necessary because it's not (yet) actually part 
> of
> the Python standard library).  The only problem is that it's rather 
> large.
> I claim this is (mostly) not my fault ;-) because the cookie standards 
> are
> a royal mess.  For a number of reasons, it will be significantly 
> smaller
> in the form I hope will get into the Python standard lib., but it'll 
> still
> be bigish.

How big can it really be?  I don't see how that would be a problem.  
Cookies suck, they act all funny and always seem unpredictable.  If 
your library can hide that, great!  It's certainly not worth 
simplifying the code if it means making the library less robust.

I'm all for hiding crufty stuff behind simpler interfaces.  If the 
cruft leaks out that might be an issue, but you probably have a more 
informed opinion about whether you have been able to keep it in or not.

--
Ian Bicking | ianb at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org