Oblig cookie rant

Post #21,009 by wharris2 12/11/01 12:15:24 PM Reply	Oblig cookie rant Why do so many sites get the itch to set cookies? When you turn cookie notification on in Mozilla, I got a shock at how many sites want to infest your hard drive. My cookperm.txt file has over 4000 entries, for Pete's sake. (Mostly to deny cookies.) I can understand (without liking it very much) cookies set by banner ads, and I completely understand sites where you save personal preferences, but there are some cookies I Just Don't Get. Then there are the cookie-Nazi sites, those that require a cookie for no good reason. For example, at [link\|http://www.law.com\|www.law.com], you can get to the first page, but any selection you make off that page wants and NEEDS you to allow them to set cookies. "Sorry. You must have cookies enabled to enjoy this site." I visit the site usually via a reference from [link\|http://www.overlawyered.com\|www.overlawyered.com]. I have no desire or need to have them provide "better and more personalized service" to me. I don't want them to provide personalized service. Now, likely they aren't doing anything nefarious with stuff stored in their cooky(ies), but the thought of providing lawyers any more information about me than they absolutely need is a bit chilling, as well. (That site also does the (in)famous "back arrow takeover" on its "you have to have cookies enabled" page, which doesn't do much to impove my attitude toward the site.) "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
Post #21,048 by Ashton 12/11/01 4:27:27 PM Reply	Back-arrow &$&%#* disabling - Other than manual selection of previous, from history file - is there any neat trick for evading this idiocy (aside from e-mailing the mouth-breather admin, to no effect) ? A.
Post #21,049 by drewk 12/11/01 4:34:00 PM Reply	Disable javascript Unless there's another way to do it with IE, you need javascript to "disable" the back button. Really what you're doing is replacing the previous element in the history list with the current page. So "history.go(-1)" takes you "back" to where you already are. Actually, I believe there's a few other tricks to do it with javascript, but that's usually how I see it. The annoying thing is that the ability is there for a very real need. If you're doing a redirect, you need to purge the redirect page from the history so you don't get in a back-and-forth loop. We have to fight the terrorists as if there were no rules and preserve our open society as if there were no terrorists. -- [link\|http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/opinion/BIO-FRIEDMAN.html\|Thomas Friedman]
Post #21,089 by Ashton 12/11/01 7:12:03 PM Reply	Not IE. Also - JS is on only rarely. Tryin K-meleon next :-)
Post #21,079 by kmself 12/11/01 6:13:35 PM Reply	Bad lawyer, no cookie Law.com is one of the more consistently fucked up websites I've encountered, from basic usability and legibility. It seems to be getting slightly better -- I can read three of the last four pages I've looked at -- but there are still some screwed up elements -- a search button that appears directly over text. The problem is gross abuse of the DIV tag. The page is forcing absolute placement of elements, which simply doesn't work if screen element proportions aren't identical to those used by the site's designer. I've used tidy to convert the div statements to CSS stylesheet elements, and modified attributes of the DIV element to modify placement of page elements. The problem is that the page commits the sin of absolute page layout. While CSS can resolve some similar issues, there's no general rule which can fix this particular page. Various attempts -- changing positional handling, disabling 'top/bottom/left/right' attributes, etc., don't help display this page any better. Fundamentally, it looks like a (poor-quality) lawyer's mentality's come to play: an attempt to dictate terms too rigidly has resulted in something which neither fits the original intent nor the needs of the reader. `-- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?`

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