Also, I don't see the advantage of storing session/auth tokens in localstorage over cookies. Both are stored in plain text, and can be read if somehow it is obtained. Also, using localstorage means writing your own client-side implementation of doing the session management.
I also don't see the advantage of using session tokens in URLs. Anyway cookies are included as part of header of the HTTP request, you don't have to have your application send session trackers. I think both are functionally same and the tokens in URLs just does not look good!
And public/private key-based signing system is still not there yet, unless we simplify some UX issues about having private/public keys for every user, we are not getting there.
So, it looks like, to me, there is no really effective alternative for doing sessions apart from cookies (even in HTTP/2)?!
No, they are not.
Every time I use Tor, I appreciate your viewpoint. But trying to pretend that most developers are better off spending their time maintaining a separate renderer for a few edge case users is not really reflective of reality.
I've worked on more "web apps" than I can count and the reality is, only 2 of them were legitimate use cases for a pure JS solution. And we gain nothing from it. I've just spent all morning debugging an issue with a complicated angular directive (and not for the first time) that would have been a few lines of jquery a couple of years ago. Probably because a bored dev wanted to play with a new toy.
As you imply, we were writing sophisticated web apps long before AJAX was popularised and those apps were way more reliable and predictable than what we have now, and they worked in Lynx if you wanted.
>that would have been a few lines of jquery a couple of years ago
Irony?