Understanding Cookies
A cookie is a block of ASCII text that a web server can pass into a user’s instance of Netscape Navigator (and many other web browsers). Once received, the web browser sends the cookie every time a new document is requested from the web server. Cookies are transmitted by the underlying HTTP protocol, which means that they can be sent with HTML files, images (GIFs, JPEGs, and PNGs), sounds, or any other data type.
Netscape introduced “cookies” with Navigator Version 2.0. The original purpose of cookies was to make it possible for a web server to track a client through multiple HTTP requests. This sort of tracking is needed for complex web-based applications that need to maintain state between web pages.
Typical applications for cookies include the following:
A catalog site might use a cookie to implement an electronic “shopping cart.”
A news site might use cookies so that subscribers see local news and weather.
A subscription-only site might use cookies to store subscription information, so that a username/password combination does not need to be presented each time the user visits the site.
The preliminary cookie specification can be found at http://www.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html . RFC 2965, dated October 2000, outlines a proposed codification of the cookie specification, but as of August 2001 this standard had still not been adopted by the IETF.
The Cookie Protocol
A web server sends a cookie to your browser by transmitting a Set-Cookie message ...
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