Cookies
Cookies are the best current way to identify users and allow persistent sessions. They don’t suffer many of the problems of the previous techniques, but they often are used in conjunction with those techniques for extra value. Cookies were first developed by Netscape but now are supported by all major browsers.
Because cookies are important, and they define new HTTP headers, we’re going to explore them in more detail than we did the previous techniques. The presence of cookies also impacts caching, and most caches and browsers disallow caching of any cookied content. The following sections present more details.
Types of Cookies
You can classify cookies broadly into two types: session cookies and persistent cookies. A session cookie is a temporary cookie that keeps track of settings and preferences as a user navigates a site. A session cookie is deleted when the user exits the browser. Persistent cookies can live longer; they are stored on disk and survive browser exits and computer restarts. Persistent cookies often are used to retain a configuration profile or login name for a site that a user visits periodically.
The only difference between session cookies and persistent cookies is when they expire. As we will see later, a cookie is a session cookie if its Discard parameter is set, or if there is no Expires or Max-Age parameter indicating an extended expiration time.
How Cookies Work
Cookies are like “Hello, My Name Is” stickers stuck onto users by servers. When a user visits ...
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