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Cookies: Browsers
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Cookies are messages that web servers pass to your web browser when you visit Internet sites. Your browser stores each message in a small file, called cookie.txt. When you request another page from the server, your browser sends the cookie back to the server. These files typically contain information about your visit to the web page, as well as any information you've volunteered, such as your name and interests.
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Cookies can ... be set by JavaScript or similar scripts running within the browser. In JavaScript, the object document.cookie is used for this purpose. For example, the instruction document.cookie = "temperature=20" creates a cookie of name temperature and value 20.[30]
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Cookies set by JavaScript or VBScript reside in the browser's memory already, so you will know if they have been accepted right away. Check by setting a test value, and then try to read that value back out of the cookie. If the value still exists, the cookie was accepted.
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Technically, cookies are arbitrary pieces of data chosen by the Web server and sent to the browser. The browser returns them unchanged to the server, introducing a state (memory of previous events) into otherwise stateless HTTP transactions. Without cookies, each retrieval of a Web page or component of a Web page is an isolated event, mostly unrelated to all other views of the pages of the same site. By returning a cookie to a web server, the browser provides the server a means of connecting the current page view with prior page views. Other than being set by a web server, cookies can ... be set by a script in a language such as JavaScript, if supported and enabled by the Web browser.
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While cookies were initially.developed by Netscape, Microsoft has endorsed them enthusiastically and made them a core part of many of its tools, as well as its web sites. While both vendors use the same cookies, the ways in which they apply them are frequently quite different. Similar tools can use significantly different methods to obtain the same result, while remaining compatible with browsers from both parties. The simple structure of cookies has shielded them from incompatibilities to some extent, but developers will need to know how different servers and different technologies apply them.
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"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.'"
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