Slashdot | A Movie From Before Movies Were Invented

Slashdot | A Movie From Before Movies Were Invented: "cookie etiquette (Score:1, Offtopic)
by fermion (181285) <[lowt] [at] [bigfoot.com]> on Sunday April 11, @10:51AM (#8830223)
(Last Journal: Saturday October 04, @11:52PM)
Can anyone tell me why designers set up sites to store cookies prior to delivering any data? To me this is so ignorant. I mean how many times have you been surfing for information or a product, click a link, and have a cookie request pop up. You don't know the site from Adam, you don't know if it is going to have anything useful. You have no way to decide, as no content has been delivered. You don't want to have to go and delete the cookie or change the settings. I mean after all you just want to look for a second. They don't ask you for an ID when you browse at the mall. Some shady car dealers do this, but when they do i tell them to fuck off and go somewhere else.

So, being a prudent surfer, you deny the cookie. I mean how useful can a site be if they won't even allow a page to render before setting a cookie. This is one of the first rules of usability. Before asking the user to do anything, the site must clearly establish a benefit. I mean if I accepted every cookie of every site that wanted to set it before rendering I would have hundreds of useless site cookies. Much of the time I look at the page, decide it is useless, and go on my way.

So to those of you who are currently in the middle of this modern client/server design, why do require a token even before the user has a chance to establish the identify of the website."