draft-kristol-http-state-mgmt-00.txt, .ps

In case it escaped the attention of http-wg, this I-D is the result of
the state management sub-group's efforts since the December IETF.

Dave Kristol
=======
A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts
directories.


       Title     : Proposed HTTP State Management Mechanism
       Author(s) : D. Kristol, L. Montulli
       Filename  : draft-kristol-http-state-mgmt-00.txt, .ps
       Pages     : 17
       Date      : 02/23/1996

HTTP, the protocol that underpins the World-Wide Web (WWW), is stateless.
That is, each request stands on its own; origin servers don't need to
remember what happened with previous requests to service a new one.
Statelessness is a mixed blessing, because there are potential WWW
applications, like ``shopping baskets'' and library browsing, for which the
history of a user's actions is useful or essential.                    This
proposal outlines a way to introduce state into HTTP.  New request and
response headers, Cookie and Set-Cookie, carry the state back and forth,
thus relieving the origin server from needing to keep an extensive per-user
or per-connection database.  The changes required to user agents, origin
servers, and proxy servers to support state management are modest.  This
proposal, while very similar to Netscape's original state management
(``Cookie'') proposal, differs slightly and incompatibly.  It assumes that
origin servers, proxies, and user agents use the HTTP/1.1 protocol.
However, it can interoperate with HTTP/1.0 agents.  (See the HISTORICAL
section.)

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Received on Monday, 26 February 1996 08:13:45 UTC