ikiwiki/doc/bugs/login_page_should_note_cookie_requirement.mdwn

At the moment, you go through the login shuffle and then are told that cookies are needed, so you lose all your data and login again.  It would be much slicker to note by the edit link, or at least on the login page, that cookies are required.

> Hmm, it seems to me to be fairly obvious, since the vast majority of
> websites that have a login require cookies. Such warnings used to be
> common, but few sites bother with them anymore. --[[Joey]]

>> Very few websites break without cookies.  Even fewer lose data.
>> Can ikiwiki avoid being below average by default? --[MJR](http://mjr.towers.org.uk)

>>> Can we avoid engaging in hyperbole? (Hint: Your browser probably has a
>>> back button. Hint 2: A username/password does not count as "lost data".
>>>  Hint 3: Now we're arguing, which is pointless.) --[[Joey]]

Even better would be to only display the cookie note as a warning if the login page doesn't receive a session cookie.

> I considered doing this before, but it would require running the cgi once
> to attempt to set the cookie and then redirecting to the cgi a second
> time to check if it took, which is both complicated and probably would
> look bad.

>> Might this be possible client-side with javascript? A quick google suggests it is possible:
>> <http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/cookiedetect.shtml>. MJR, want to try adding
>> that?  -- [[Will]]

Best of all would be to use URL-based or hidden-field-based session tokens if cookies are not permitted.

> This is not very doable since most of the pages the user browses are
> static pages in a static location.

>> The pages that lose data without cookies (the edit pages, primarily)
>> don't look static. Are they really? --[MJR](http://mjr.towers.org.uk)

>>> As soon as you post an edit page, you are back to a static website.

>>> It is impossible to get to an edit page w/o a cookie, unless
>>> anonymous edits are allowed, in which case it will save. No data loss.
>>> Since noone is working on this, and the nonsense above has pissed me
>>> off to the point that I will certianly never work on it, I'm going to
>>> close it. --[[Joey]] [[done]]