Dennis Lee Bieber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Do we have the same dictionary? > > Ephemeral, as in "mayflies are ephemeral", means "of short life"... > A cookie with a built-in expiration would, to my mind, be "ephemeral"
Ephemeral cookies in web-head jargon are cookies with no specified expiration date, so they go away when you close the browser. Cookies with expiration dates persist until that date (which admittedly might be just a few seconds away but usually is much longer) if the server side programmer gets what s/he wants. Usually, the expiration date is WAY in the future, i.e. the server is either trying to set a persistent login credential (ok, if the user wants it) or is trying to do invasive user tracking (not good: see the recent news stories about the court case around the US government trying to get Google search logs, and then remember that Google sets a cookie that tries to correlate all of any user's searches with each other). > Firefox control has: > > Keep cookies: until they expire > until I close Firefox Yes, it took a very long time to get some browser to implement it. There's a huge and hairy thread about it in bugzilla.mozilla.com somewhere asking why Communicator didn't do it. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
