Re: sweets

Elaine Foley (epfoley@dimacs.rutgers.edu)
Tue, 28 Jan 1997 14:35:37 -0500


lou giglio wrote:
>
> Anne Huffer wrote:
> >
> > I am talking cookies! Judy asked awhile back about them. What purpose
> > do they serve? Should we allow them to be set? Why, why not? I reached a
> > site this am that asked a minimum (I lost count) of 20 times to set one.
> > I kept responding with cancel (Netscape 3.0) and I feel as if the site
> > took much longer to load than it would have had I accepted in the first
> > place. I think this would make a good quickie topic for the next follow-
> > up. Anyone else now understand or am I alone?
> > What does everyone else think?
> >
> > Anne HufferI was showing two of my colleagues my homepage when one of them received
> a cookie message!! I am clueless!! What does that message mean or
> should my mother have told me about this years ago? Lou

Lou, Anne et al,

Here is the description of COOKIE that Paul Burchard mentioned in an
earlier posting.

cookie
When you need to pass some snippet
of information to another system to
make it do something, how do you do
it? If you're on the Web or some other
network, you use a cookie (also known
as a magic cookie). The cookie is a text
file saved in your browser's directory or
folder and stored in RAM while your
browser is running. Most of the
information in a cookie is pretty
mundane stuff, but some Web sites use
cookies to store personal preferences.
(SEARCH.COM, MSN, and
Netscape all have personalization
processes that use cookies to store
information). If you want to see what
information is stored in your cookie file,
use a text editor or a word processor to
open a file called cookie.txt or
MagicCookie in your browser's folder
or directory.

Paul gave us the link to
http://www.cnet.com/Resources/Info/Glossary/Terms/cookie.html and this
is where I found the description.

What you may be experiencing (at least some of you) is that your version
of Netscape may not be fully configured, so it probably would be a good
idea to check your cookie file to see what (if anything) is in it.

Hangbiao, Paul - respond if I'm incorrect in any of this.

Elaine