Making the Most from the Drudgery of Others

By Greg Meckes
A Webreference Open Publishing article

Introduction

Cookies - by this point, you've heard about them. Now I'll give you the skinny about what they are and how they work. A lot of the code necessary for creating cookies is available for free and easy to find. You can utilize the hard work of generous professionals for yourself, without enduring any debugging chaos.

Cookies can be created with both CGI scripts and scripting languages like JavaScript and VBScript. Here we'll use JavaScript because not everyone has CGI-BIN access, and JavaScript has wider client-side support than VBScript.

In this article, we'll discover how to put cookies in our Web pages and look at some examples. I'll also show you how to take JavaScript cookie scripts that are ready made, and use, modify, combine, and otherwise manipulate them for your own use. In the process, you'll learn where to get them and make them work.

Contents

• Introduction
• What They Are
• Are Cookies Safe and Secure?
• How They Work
• How to Get Them Into Your Pages -- Making the Most from the Drudgery of Others
• Cookie Examples
• Summary