Basic HTML version of Foils prepared 2 Sept 1997

Foil 31 Maintaining State with Netscape Cookies

From CGI Programming with Advanced Topics Jackson State University Mississippi -- Fall Semester 97. by Nancy McCracken *

The Netscape Browser can store information in fields on the client side. The browser stores this information in a text file in the browswer directory and can thus provide "persistant" cookies: the information can be saved over many browser invocations, as well as transactions.
Basically, the browser sets up a cookie whenever it receives a "Set-Cookie" header from a server, and it will pass back information in the "HTTP_COOKIE" environment variable whenever the user requests a document that fits the validity parameters of the Set-Cookie header.
More general than hidden fields but currently only works on netscape browsers, work is being done on a general standard for HTTP state-info mechanism.
Current cookie specification is at URL:
http://home.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html



© Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, Syracuse University, npac@npac.syr.edu

If you have any comments about this server, send e-mail to webmaster@npac.syr.edu.

Page produced by wwwfoil on Tue Sep 2 1997