Re: lynx-dev tvgen cookie problem

[David Woolley]

> 
> The  problem of accessing the tvgen website has still not been resolved.
> Could someone familiar with cookie handling please take a look? -- or direct
> me to documentation on cookies so I can pursue it myself?

RFC 2109

> Someone (I can't remember who) suggested that the problem might be that lynx
> is presenting cookies to the server in reverse order.  Someone else suggested
> there might be a spurious newline in the cookie file (buffer overflow).
> Still others suggested the site is broken.

If presenting them in reverse order, causes a problem, it would imply
that the site was broken, not Lynx:

   If multiple cookies satisfy the criteria above, they are ordered in
   the Cookie header such that those with more specific Path attributes
   precede those with less specific.  Ordering with respect to other
   attributes (e.g., Domain) is unspecified.

i.e. order of arrival is not a condition and there are conditions which
may cause order of arrival to be violated.

The other thing to consider with so many cookies is that there may be
some danger of violating the minimum implementation limits, or of 
unecessarily limiting the number of sites for which a minimum implementation
can track cookies (i.e. at the full 20 cookies, one can only track 15 sites
for a total of 300):

      * at least 300 cookies

      * at least 4096 bytes per cookie (as measured by the size of the
        characters that comprise the cookie non-terminal in the syntax
        description of the Set-Cookie header)

      * at least 20 cookies per unique host or domain name

   User agents created for specific purposes or for limited-capacity
   devices should provide at least 20 cookies of 4096 bytes, to ensure
   that the user can interact with a session-based origin server.