Ask HN: How would Web development be different if HTTP was a stateful protocol?

2 pointsvarrock3 comments

I was refreshing on the history of the World Wide Web and glossed over the fact that the HTTP protocol was designed to be stateless. It got me thinking; what would the implications of a stateful protocol be for Web developers? Would it also fundamentally change the way users browse the Web?

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No, because it is stateful now that we have cookies.

You're right, but cookies aren't really a part of HTTP, they're a browser hack that got popular.

You could just as easily say that HTTP is stateless because of backend databases and sessions. It's true about the web, but not HTTP per se.

I disagree. They might have had a different name, but they would end up being essentially the same thing: a place to store a unique identifier (or other information), with an expiration date and some information about what server to send them to.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

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