Development Tips - Cookies
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About CookiesInternet Cookies are a small piece of data stored locally by your browser that saves information and helps identify you to web sites upon subsequent visits. In the hands of a skilled webmaster, the cookie offers limitless possibilities in the areas of web customization and user tracking. Cookies are like little identification cards passed out by web sites. Like conventional ID cards, cookies are carried with the user, they store information to help identify you, and they expire at a certain date and then must be reissued. Also, as you probably have different cards for your local department store, the movie rentals, and the library, you are issued different and separate cookies by different web servers. Each browser can accept up to 20 cookies by a single web server and can have as many as 300 cookies total on file at any one time. A cookie is sent as an HTTP header from the web server and the transmitted information is stored locally in a text file. A cookie can be as large as 4 kilobytes or 4000 characters in length. Cookies are not shared by browsers. Depending on the browser you're using, cookies you download will be stored in different ways and in different places on the hard disk. Netscape stores all cookies in one text file called cookies.txt on the PC or magiccookie on the Mac. If you open cookies.txt you'll see that each cookie has its own line and they are grouped by domain. Internet Explorer stores cookies from each domain in seperate text files stored with the cache. All the cookies in one file are stored in one string separated by delimiters. Below is an example of the HTTP header responsible for sending a cookie. Set-Cookie: name=value; expires=date; path=pathname; domain=domainname; secure
Each cookie has six definable attributes: a name, a value, an expiration date, the domain for which the cookie can be read, the path in which the cookie can be read, and a Boolean security setting. Delicious Recipes There are many methods of setting, reading, and manipulating cookies. You can add code to manipulate cookies in CGI scripts and even embed cookie HTTP requests directly into your HTML files. JavaScript, however, provides perhaps the simplest and most flexible interface for setting and manipulating cookies. Unfortunately, you cannot automatically assume that all users will have JavaScript turned on. For that matter you cannot be completely sure that all users will have cookies turned on. While both of the major Internet browsers allow users the option of surfing without JavaScript or cookies, both technologies are turned on by default. The great majority of Internet users visiting your site will be able to accept cookies and run JavaScript functions. Currently, most large web sites are utilizing both cookies and JavaScript in some capacity. Click the button below to see if you have cookies turned on. |
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