Re: HTTP Session Extension draft

On Wed, 5 Jul 1995, Brian Behlendorf wrote:

> Won't stop it from being put into Netscape 1.2 of course, with the
> corresponding "you must be using N1.2 to view these pages!"  messages across
> the net I'm sure.... 

Maybe I've misinterpreted this statement but.... cookies are implemented 
in Netscape 1.1 and 1.1N, right now. Your statement seems to indicate 
they may be in 1.2, but they're here already.... Haven't seen any pages 
that make use of them in a way that excludes non-cookie browsers yet, 
although there was one thing that a friend of mine used them for that 
struck me as really neat. He used them to simulate a multi-host server, 
without using multihoming, a modified IP driver, or waiting for HTTP 1/1. 
He did it as following, using generic examples:

He had two domain names for his server (which was a Mac running WebSTAR,
but that's besides the point), www.A.com and www.B.com. He had two files
on his server, one for each, /A.html and /B.html respectively. He then set
up the main index file as index.cgi, and had the CGI script return a menu
that said "click here to go to A, here to go to B." But it also had HTTP
headers that set cookies, which expired in 1999 (if you don't give an
expiry date, they're junked by Netscape at the end of the session),
specifying each host and giving a unique string for each one. That way, the
next time that user specified http://www.A.com/, Netscape would send along a
Cookie: header with the A string, and the cgi script knew to redirect them to
A.html. Likewise with www.B.com, the B string and B.html. (See the Netscape 
document at http://www.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html for 
technical details of how to implent cookies.)

It was an interesting approach, I thought. And if you didn't support
cookies, or had never visited the page before, you just got a menu of
where to go, which works anyway. Of course, a Host: or Orig-URI: header in
the HTTP request would be a better way to do this, but the cookie approach
shows some ingenuity, I thought, on his part (Eric, if you're out there,
take a bow). 

I don't know if this anecdote (true, though) is appropriate to this 
mailing list, but I thought it was interesting, and sort of had to do 
with what this thread was about.

--/ Alexei Kosut <akosut@nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us> /--------/ Lefler on IRC
----------------------------/ <http://www.nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us/~akosut/>
The viewpoints expressed above are entirely false, and in no way
represent Alexei Kosut nor any other person or entity. /--------------

Received on Wednesday, 5 July 1995 21:18:45 UTC