8.1. Benefits of Cookies
This section summarizes four typical ways in which cookies can add value to your site.
Identifying a User During an E-commerce Session
Many on-line stores use a “shopping cart” metaphor in which the user selects an item, adds it to his shopping cart, then continues shopping. Since the HTTP connection is usually closed after each page is sent, when the user selects a new item to add to the cart, how does the store know that it is the same user that put the previous item in the cart? Persistent (keep-alive) HTTP connections (see Section 7.4) do not solve this problem, since persistent connections generally apply only to requests made very close together in time, as when a browser asks for the images associated with a Web ...
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