IETF RFC 6265
HTTP State Management Mechanism
Organization: | IETF |
Publication Date: | 1 April 2011 |
Status: | active |
Page Count: | 37 |
scope:
Introduction
This document defines the HTTP Cookie and Set-Cookie header fields. Using the Set-Cookie header field, an HTTP server can pass name/value pairs and associated metadata (called cookies) to a user agent. When the user agent makes subsequent requests to the server, the user agent uses the metadata and other information to determine whether to return the name/value pairs in the Cookie header.
Although simple on their surface, cookies have a number of complexities. For example, the server indicates a scope for each cookie when sending it to the user agent. The scope indicates the maximum amount of time in which the user agent should return the cookie, the servers to which the user agent should return the cookie, and the URI schemes for which the cookie is applicable.
There are two audiences for this specification: developers of cookie-generating servers and developers of cookie-consuming user agents.
To maximize interoperability with user agents, servers SHOULD limit themselves to the well-behaved profile defined in Section 4 when generating cookies.
User agents MUST implement the more liberal processing rules defined in Section 5, in order to maximize interoperability with existing servers that do not conform to the well-behaved profile defined in Section 4.
This document specifies the syntax and semantics of these headers as they are actually used on the Internet. In particular, this document does not create new syntax or semantics beyond those in use today. The recommendations for cookie generation provided in Section 4 represent a preferred subset of current server behavior, and even the more liberal cookie processing algorithm provided in Section 5 does not recommend all of the syntactic and semantic variations in use today. Where some existing software differs from the recommended protocol in significant ways, the document contains a note explaining the difference.
Prior to this document, there were at least three descriptions of cookies: the so-called "Netscape cookie specification" [Netscape], RFC 2109 [RFC2109], and RFC 2965 [RFC2965]. However, none of these documents describe how the Cookie and Set-Cookie headers are actually used on the Internet (see [Kri2001] for historical context). In relation to previous IETF specifications of HTTP state management mechanisms, this document requests the following actions:
1. Change the status of [RFC2109] to Historic (it has already been obsoleted by [RFC2965]).
2. Change the status of [RFC2965] to Historic.
3. Indicate that [RFC2965] has been obsoleted by this document.
In particular, in moving RFC 2965 to Historic and obsoleting it, this document deprecates the use of the Cookie2 and Set-Cookie2 header fields.
Document History
