RFC - 2965

HTTP State Management Mechanism

Original:	ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2965.txt
Authors:	D. Kristol [Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies], L. Montulli [Epinions.com, Inc.]
Date:	October 2000
Category:	Proposed Standard

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Obsoletes:
RFC-2109	HTTP State Management Mechanism (Obsoleted by RFC-2965prop)

Referred by:	12 RFC
Refers to:	5 RFC

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Status

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(-> 2965^prop) and obsoletes it.

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