A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts
directories.
Title : Proposed HTTP State-Info Mechanism
Author(s) : D. Kristol
Filename : draft-kristol-http-state-info-00.txt, .ps
Pages : 7
Date : 08/23/1995
HTTP, the protocol that underpins the World-Wide Web (WWW), is stateless.
That is, each request stands on its own; origin servers don't need to
remember what happened with previous requests to service a new one.
Statelessness is a mixed blessing, because there are potential WWW
applications, like ``shopping baskets'' and library browsing, for which the
history of a user's actions is useful or essential.
This proposal outlines a way to introduce state into HTTP. A new
request/response header, State-Info, carries the state back and forth, thus
relieving the origin server from needing to keep an extensive per-user or
per-connection database. The changes required to user agents, origin
servers, and proxy servers to support State-Info are very modest.
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