A Cookie is a little nugget of information that is sent to the browser from a World Wide Web Server. This block of data can be anything, a unique user ID generated by the server, the current date and time, the IP Address of where the browser is logged onto the net or any other chunk of data that you want.

After a browser recieves a cookie it will then send that cookie (nugget of info) to the server that set it whenever it requests an html page. The browser will only send the cookie to the server that originally set it. This means that I (at my site) can't tell if you (some browser) has cookies the other sites have set.

Cookies can be used for a number of cool things, here's a couple that come to mind.

Online ordering systems. An online ordering system could be developed using cookies that would remember what a person wants to buy, this way if a person spends three hours ordering CDs at your site and suddenly has to get off the net they could quit the browser and return weeks or even years later and still have thos items in their shopping basket.

Site personalization. This is one of the coolest uses, let's say a person comes to your site but doesn't want to see any banner advertisements. You could allow them to select this as an option and from then on (until the cookie expires) they wouldn't see them.

Website tracking. Here is a hot button! A lot of people think it is an invasion of privacy if I, as a web site designer, want to see what interests them. Site tracking can show you "Dead End Paths", places in your website that people go to and then wander off because they don't have any more interesting links to hit. It can also give you more accurate counts of how many people have been to which pages on your site. A tough problem with tracking "people hits" as opposed to "hits" is that alot of internet service providers have 100 or so IP Address that they share between thousands of users. So if a certain IP address hits your site 50 times you can't tell if it is one person hitting the reload button or 50 people seeing your site for the first time.

An HTTP Cookie cannot be used to get data from your hard drive, get your email address or steal sensitive information about your person. You have to use other technologies to do that : ).

An HTTP Cookie can (yes it can) be used to track where you travel over a particular site, It can't be used to track your wanderings over the net as a whole. As soon as you leave site A and go to site B, site A can't know a thing about you until you come back. BTW This site tracking can be easily done without using cookies as well, using cookies just makes the tracking data a little more consistent.

If you don't want servers to set cookies, you must download version 3.0 (still in beta) or greater of Netscape and select the "Alert me if thar be cookies" option in the prefs. Locking the cookies.txt file will not stop cookies from working. It will affect how long they last, if this file is locked then netscape can't write any data to it so when you quit netscape the cookies can't move from memory to your cookies.txt file so they go away (or netscape bombs).

Anyone with the Moxy to try!

Browsers: Most of the people on the internet use Netscape, Mosaic or Microsoft IE. These three browsers have been supporting the HTTP Cookie for awhile. There are others but I gave up trying to keep track of them. Digital Equipment Corp has a script that will allow your browser to see if it will accept a cookie as well as a bunch of other stuff I ignored. If you don't want to take the test the Cookie results can be viewed directly.