Cookies Were Wonderful

Monday, November 23, 1998 by Dave Winer.

Steve Silberman was first to write a remembrance of Netscape.

http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/16434.html

It's a little premature, but amen! I also have fond memories of the power of the web thru Netscape's early versions. It's a good idea for all of us who got the web religion in late 1994 and early 1995 to remember the optimism and sense of discovery of those days.

Now that we know that it can happen, why aren't we always so powerful? It's the loop! One more time, back to days of yore, when big company FUD could stop anything dead in its tracks.

Cookies were wonderful 

Steve's piece put me in an interesting mood. I'm working on Cookies today, and that took me to the original spec on Netscape's site. A real trip down memory lane!

http://home.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html

Cookies are still with us, and they will be with us as long as we're using the web. They were a powerful idea that went somewhere.

Cookies were deployed before any standards body could object. And oh boy, if a standards body had gotten in that loop, I'm sure they would have been so complex that they'd be totally unusable.

Which way Steve? 

So, to AOL's Steve Case, where are we going?

Is the Netscape/AOL merger, if it happens, like this handshake between two famous icons of the sixties:

http://www.scripting.com/davenet/stories/NixonElvis.html

Or will it enable Netscape's silent partners, the web developers, to do neat new things that are as wonderful in 1999 as cookies were in 1995?

There's lots more work to do.

http://www.asktog.com/columns/015WebDesignRant.html

Let's keep diggin!

Dave