10.12. Cookies

In 1992 Netscape Communications Corporation publicly released the specifications of a revolutionary concept that would forever shape and improve the quality of Web applications. This concept was called the cookie.

The original HTTP protocol developed at CERN in 1989 was not designed for the purposes for which it is used today, such as the shopping cart model employed in many electronic commerce systems. As a protocol, it was designed using a stateless model to allow CERN's scientists to access static and linked hypertext documents, mostly research papers. Today, a lot of the WWW's content is dynamic, such as customized news reports, Web portals, and shopping in online bookstores such as Amazon.com.

The basic idea of cookies is ...

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