Net Scape idea for caching a little bit of data (typically for Digital Identity) in the Web Browser Thin Client.

http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html

Mark Nottingham on a problem with the original spec as part of HTTP, and the partial support for later [RFC]-s.

Note a browser supports a limited number of cookies. I'm not sure how standard that it: the old Net Scape standard says 20 cookies per host/domain.

• AmaZon has a patent on storing structured data within a cookie. Which is one approach to getting past the limited number of cookies.

One little implementation annoyance: if you're building apps for multiple hosts in the same domain, you'll want to set the cookie's scope to e.g. "*.domain.com". Unfortunately, while this will result in the browser returning that cookie for every request from a host with an explicit hostname within domain.com, it won't work for the direct "domain.com" hostname itself!

Note that Web Cookie-s are being increasingly blocked/deleted because of [SpyWare] concerns. If defaults on these systems block all cookies you could find people having problems using your WebApp, and newbies would be unable to unblock them

• or maybe this isn't happening as much as some people think

Another nastiness: some frameworks expect/demand that cookie values be html-encoded, and handle this transparently, so when you have different parts of your site handled by different frameworks with different rules, you can go bananas.

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