On Sun, 13 Mar 2016, Tim Rühsen wrote:

> How do you judge the expected against what the browsers accept ? In the
> means of "strict when generating, relaxed with parsing".

In general for protocols, the "liberal in what you accept" idea has proved
itself to be a really bad idea many times over by now. But cookies come from a
different age and they're produced by so many different implemenatations
(there's really no major 3-4 ipmlementations there but rather hundreds or
thousands of custom ones) that fixing the generators is next to impossible.
That's also a reason why moving away from cookies to something else is so
extremely hard.

Anyway, that's why we're stuck with being liberal enough in the parsing to
accept most of the world's weirdo cookie headers.

> At least the browsers are well-used real implementations...

Yes. That's also why I believe that for some of those test case failures where
we can see that the browsers don't adhere to the spec or even between other
browsers it is *probably* mostly for cookie formats that are extremely rare in
the wild so it doesn't really matter what the browsers do in those cases.

Browsers in general try to keep or raise the number of users and they do that
(among other ways) by making sure the browsers work with the sites the users
visit. If browser A breaks on a popular site, users will switch to browser B.
Over time, that makes most browsers support 99.X% of all sites their users go
to and the few remaining sites that use something the browsers don't support
have a low enough user share to not warrant the effort to support that too.
(Well, yes, in many cases fixing could mean pursuading the sites to fix their
broken data/code but that's besides the point here.)

So, if wget2/curl would fail some of those tests where the browsers also are
failing, that would not necessarily mean that we should fix the code, maybe we
should fix the spec/test instead. And failing such a test would be less of a
concern to me than failing a test that all the browsers agree with already.

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se

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Received on 2016-03-13