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How Not To Design a Protocol
An anonymous reader writes "Google security researcher Michael Zalewski posted a cautionary tale for software engineers: amusing historical overview of all the security problems with HTTP cookies, including an impressive collection of issues we won't be able to fix. Pretty amazing that modern web commerce uses a mechanism so hacky that does not even have a proper specification."
"Working" is measured over a very wide spectrum. On one hand, we have "broken", and on the other we have "working perfectly". The web is far, far closer to the "broken" side of the spectrum than it ever has been to the "working perfectly" side.
Put simply, almost everything about the web is one filthy hack upon another. It's a huge stack of shitty "extensions" that were often made with little thought, so it's no wonder web development is so horrible today.
HTTP has been repurposed far more than it should have been. Its lack of statefulness has resulted in horrible hacks like cookies and AJAX. HTTP makes caching far harder than it should be. SSL and TLS are mighty awful hacks. And those are just a few of its problems!
HTML is a mess, and HTML5 is just going to make the situation worse. Even after 20 years, layout is still a huge hassle. CSS tries to bring in concepts from the publishing world, but they're not at all what we need for web layout, and thus everyone is unhappy.
A lot of people will claim otherwise, and they're wrong, but JavaScript is a fucking horrible scripting language. It's even worse for writing anything significant. And no, it's absolutely nothing like Scheme (some JavaScript advocate always makes this stupid claim whenever the topic of JavaScript's horrid nature comes up).
PHP is one of the few popular languages that can rival JavaScript in terms of being absolutely shitty. Then there are other server-side shenanigans like the NoSQL movement, which arose solely because there are a lot of web "developers" who don't know how to use relational databases properly. I've seriously dealt with such "developers" and many of them didn't even know what indexes are!
Most web browsers themselves are quite shitty. It has gotten better recently, but they still use huge amounts of RAM for the relatively simple services they provide.
The only people involved with some sort of web-related software development who aren't absolute fuck-ups are those working on HTTP servers like Apache HTTPd, nginx, and lighttpd. But now we're seeing crap like Mongrel and Mongrel2 arising in this area, so maybe it's only a matter of time before the sensible developers here move on.
So just because the web is "sort of broken", rather than "completely fucking broken", it doesn't mean that it's "working".
Ah, the OSI model (circa 1978), the polar opposite of Cookies - a spec so glorious, it's still commonly cited - yet so useless it's a 30 year old virgin, having never been implemented!