HTTP State Management Mechanism
David M. Kristol, Lou Montulli · 2000
This document specifies a way to create a stateful session with HTTP requests and responses. It describes two new headers, Cookie and Set-Cookie2, which carry state information between participating origin servers and user agents. The method described here differs from Netscape's Cookie proposal [Netscape], but it can interoperate with HTTP/1.0 user agents that use Netscape's method. (See the HISTORICAL section.) This document reflects implementation experience with RFC 2109 [RFC2109] and obsoletes it. 2. TERMINOLOGY The terms user agent , client , server, proxy, and origin server have the same meaning as in the HTTP/1.1 specification [RFC2068]. Host name (HN) means either the host domain name (HDN) or the numeric Internet Protocol (IP) address of a host. The fully qualified domain name is preferred; use of numeric IP addresses is strongly discouraged. The terms request-host and request-URI refer to the values the client would send to the server as, respectively, the host (bu...