RFC 2109 (rfc2109) - Page 1 of 21
HTTP State Management Mechanism
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
Network Working Group D. Kristol
Request for Comments: 2109 Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies
Category: Standards Track L. Montulli
Netscape Communications
February 1997
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.
1. ABSTRACT
This document specifies a way to create a stateful session with HTTP
requests and responses. It describes two new headers, Cookie and
Set-Cookie, which carry state information between participating
origin servers and user agents. The method described here differs
from Netscape's Cookie proposal, but it can interoperate with
HTTP/1.0 user agents that use Netscape's method. (See the HISTORICAL
section.)
2. TERMINOLOGY
The terms user agent, client, server, proxy, and origin server have
the same meaning as in the HTTP/1.0 specification.
Fully-qualified host name (FQHN) means either the fully-qualified
domain name (FQDN) of a host (i.e., a completely specified domain
name ending in a top-level domain such as .com or .uk), or the
numeric Internet Protocol (IP) address of a host. The fully
qualified domain name is preferred; use of numeric IP addresses is
strongly discouraged.
The terms request-host and request-URI refer to the values the client
would send to the server as, respectively, the host (but not port)
and abs_path portions of the absoluteURI (http_URL) of the HTTP
request line. Note that request-host must be a FQHN.
Kristol & Montulli Standards Track
