I noticed the new site publicsuffix.org that has been setup by the mozilla organization in an attempt to list public suffixes for all TLDs in the world, to basically know how to prevent sites from setting cookies that would span over just about all sites under that “public suffix”.

While I can see what drives this effort and since we have the same underlying problem in curl as well, I have sympathy for the effort. Still, I dread “having to” import and support this entire list in curl only to be able to better work like the browsers in the cookie department. Also, it feels like a cat and mouse race where the list may never be complete anyway. It is doomed to lack entries, or in the worst case list “public suffixes” that aren’t any such public suffixes anymore and thus it’ll prevent sites using that suffix to properly use cookies…

There’s no word on the site if IE or Opera etc are going to join this effort.

Update: there are several people expressing doubts about the virtues of this idea. Like Patrik Fältström on DNSOP.