RFC 2965 (rfc2965) - Page 1 of 26
HTTP State Management Mechanism
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
Network Working Group D. Kristol
Request for Comments: 2965 Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies
Obsoletes: 2109 L. Montulli
Category: Standards Track Epinions.com, Inc.
October 2000
HTTP State Management Mechanism
Status of this Memo
This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2000). All Rights Reserved.
IESG Note
The IESG notes that this mechanism makes use of the .local top-level
domain (TLD) internally when handling host names that don't contain
any dots, and that this mechanism might not work in the expected way
should an actual .local TLD ever be registered.
Abstract
This document specifies a way to create a stateful session with
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests and responses. It
describes three new headers, Cookie, Cookie2, 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 and
obsoletes it.
1. TERMINOLOGY
The terms user agent, client, server, proxy, origin server, and
http_URL have the same meaning as in the HTTP/1.1 specification
[RFC 2616]. The terms abs_path and absoluteURI have the same meaning
as in the URI Syntax specification [RFC 2396].
Kristol & Montulli Standards Track