Cookies

I have to say that cookies are super. There are plenty of use cases where you can take great advantage of them, for example: When you want to impress your girl-/boy-friend. Some would call it bribing. Or for bribing people. Or for making new friends by bribing people. Or to mess with others people healthy diet. You devil! Or if you want to put something into your coffee and eat it afterward. Well, the latter might is somewhat ridiculous.

You thought this article would be about the technical stuff, like web-cookies. Well, if your cookies grow webs, they got forgotten, or were just disgusting, or both. Shame on you, in any way.

There really is not much use but storing a state on a device. No, not a state like Germany or Sweden but the state of a website. If the title should appear in red or blue. I see so many websites in the wild using them, where I really ask myself what they do with all that state. And where is all the state? The only stateful element on the website is the accept-decline-element of the cookies themselves. I hope you can see now, why I find it just stupid.

You can delete the state, edit the state, and do what ever you want with it. As a consequence, your website does should store important stuff server-side anyway. And yes, they are often used track user sessions and integrate authentication to a website. About first, there are other (better) ways. About second, in most cases that is just a dangerous idea, so you really should know what you are doing. HTML was not designed to support this last use cases properly, IMHO. Authenticated use sessions, that’s a hard thing. Honestly, maybe I should write a whole post about it.

And still you see cookies everywhere, or at least the you-know-which-element. It is the worst thing about nowadays websites and shows how broke the web is (or at least most websites you find online). There can’t be any engineering behind it, or please explain it to me! It is like making cookies with a concrete mixer. Possible, but the result is rather unsatisfying.

Finally, I now understand why people say no, if people ask to accept their cookies. Just think about it for a moment, and the states, all those beautiful states that get lost. I know at least one person who would like to rule (own) them.