Maintaining State
Maintaining state means remembering information while the user moves from page to page within a Web site. With this information in hand, you can set user preferences, fill in default form values, track visit counts, and do many other things that make browsing easier for users and that give you more information about how your pages are used.
You can maintain state information in several ways:
Store it in cookies
Encode it in URL links
Send it in hidden form variables
Store it in variables in other frames
Store it on the Web server
Be aware, however, that some technical challenges regarding state maintenance can occur. While browsing a site, a user might suddenly zoom off to another Web site and return minutes, hours, or days later, ...
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