Version 2.6
Contributed to Cookie Central by David Whalen
- A Note from the Author
- 1. INTRODUCTION
- 2. GENERAL QUESTIONS/MISCELLANEOUS
- 3. COOKIE FUNDAMENTALS
- 4. ADVANCED TOPICS
A Note from the Author
(Version 2.6)
Whew! After a long delay, I am returning to the FAQ. A lot of information has been out-of-date for some time, so I felt I had to at least get us back in place.
I have noticed a growing number of sites out there that have copied all or part of my FAQ. While I should be angered at what is clearly a violation of copyright, I'll choose to be understanding and a little flattered. Honestly, people, you could at least mention that it's my work, you know. Or, you could at least link back to Cookie Central, who provides space for the FAQ free of charge.
It's things like this, and the waning interest in the cookie issue (which I feel I've done my part to help), that leads me to think that this will be the last update to the FAQ. I nearly pulled it down a year ago, but the owner of Cookie Central prevailed upon me to keep it live.
In November of 1996, I wrote the very first draft of the Cookie FAQ. It was a short treatise that ended up getting posted on Netscape's JavaScript newsgroup. The FAQ led directly to my associations with Netscape, becoming the JavaScript DevEdge Champion, and presenting an impromptu talk on cookies at DevCon. Truly a high-point in my career.
In the past five-and-a-half years, I've been able to watch cookies grow from a fledgling concept to the most important part of the internet experience. Cookies have brought personalization, commerce, and convenience to the internet, legitimizing it as a place for business, not just for science or personal home pages.
I've seen the FAQ grow as well over that time. The first draft of the FAQ was written to target developers who were trying to understand what cookies were and how they could use them. To this day, I see my examples put to use all over the internet. But the FAQ served better by informing everyday people about cookies and how they really work. I hope I've done my part to cure the hysteria.
So, I bid the FAQ good-bye. Thanks to all of you in the past who have contributed ideas, feedback, questions, and complaints. You all made a difference.
And thanks for stopping by!
-- DW
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1. INTRODUCTION
Cookies are a very important method for maintaining state on the Web. 'State' in this case refers to an application's ability to work interactively with a user, remembering all data since the application started, and differentiating between users and their individual data sets.
An analogy I like to use is a laundry cleaner's shop. You drop something off, and get a ticket. When you return with the ticket, you get your clothes back. If you don't have the ticket, then the laundry man doesn't know which clothes are yours. In fact, he won't be able to tell whether you are there to pick up clothes, or a brand new customer. As such, the ticket is critical to maintaining state between you and the laundry man.
Unfortunately, HTTP is a 'stateless' protocol. This means that each visit to a site (or even clicks within a site) is seen by the server as the first visit by the user. In essence, the server 'forgets' everything after each request, unless it can somehow mark a visitor (that is, hand him a 'laundry ticket') to help it remember. Cookies can accomplish this.
1.1 What is a Cookie?
A cookie is a text-only string that gets entered into the memory of your browser. This value of a variable that a website sets. If the lifetime of this value is set to be longer than the time you spend at that site, then this string is saved to file for future reference.
1.2 Where did the term cookies come from?
According to an article written by Paul Bonner for Builder.Com on 11/18/1997:
Cookie 5 5 8 5 Lots Of Rolls
Illformed glitch 2 v2 1 0 vst mac crack torrent. 'Lou Montulli, currently the protocols manager in Netscape's client product division, wrote the cookies specification for Navigator 1.0, the first browser to use the technology. Montulli says there's nothing particularly amusing about the origin of the name: 'A cookie is a well-known computer science term that is used when describing an opaque piece of data held by an intermediary. The term fits the usage precisely; it's just not a well-known term outside of computer science circles.'
1.3 Why do sites use Cookies?
There are many reasons a given site would wish to use cookies. These range from the ability to personalize information (like on My Yahoo or Excite), or to help with on-line sales/services (like on Amazon Books or eBay), or simply for the purposes of collecting demographic information (like DoubleClick). Cookies also provide programmers with a quick and convenient means of keeping site content fresh and relevant to the user's interests. The newest servers use cookies to help with back-end interaction as well, which can improve the utility of a site by being able to securely store any personal data that the user has shared with a site (to help with quick logins on your favorite sites, for example).
1.4 Where Can I Get More Information?
Cookie Central is dedicated to answering questions about cookies. Feel free to look around.
There's a great article concerning cookies on Marshall Brain's 'How Stuff Works'. It goes even deeper than this FAQ does, especially in the realm of public opinion. Worth a look!
The World Wide Web Consortium has an excellent FAQ to answer the majority of Internet and Web-related questions. You can read their topic: 'Do 'Cookies' Pose any Security Risks?'
In addition, there are an abundance of resources on the Internet that can help you find answers to your cookie questions. Conveniently, Yahoo has a great listing of them. I encourage you to stop by and check the list out!
2. GENERAL QUESTIONS/MISCELLANEOUS
2.1 Introduction
This section is devoted to general questions on cookies and their usage.
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2.2 Can I delete cookies?
Yes. Whether you use Internet Explorer or Netscape, your cookies are saved to a simple text file that you can delete as you please.
In order to do this properly, remember to close your browser first. This is because all your cookies are held in memory until you close your browser. So, if you delete the file with your browser open, it will make a new file when you close it, and your cookies will be back.
Remember that deleting your cookie file entirely will cause you to 'start from scratch' with every web site you usually visit. So, it may be preferable to open the cookies.txt file (in the case of Netscape) and remove only the entries you don't like, or go to the cookies folder (in the case of IE) and delete the files matching servers you don't want.