Question

I was looking at the post here which says

When the browser makes a request for a static image and sends cookies together with the request, the server doesn't have any use for those cookies. So they only create network traffic for no good reason.

Although I tend not to use cookies at all, my doubt is I used to think that the server creates the cookies to store the session varialbles etc and sends to the client. But this statement says the reverse of that. I don’t quiet understand what is the need for the browser to create and send cookies with the request, to me it doesn’t make any sense?.

Can anyone please correct me?

Thanks/.

Answer 1

The server creates the cookies, yes, but the browser has to send existing cookies back to the server on every request – that is the only way the web server can identify the user (since HTTP is stateless). Without cookies, a browser is potentially a completely different person than the last request.

Typically a cookie is just a session ID which is mapped to a database entry with all of the session data.

The idea of cookieless domains is to have static resources (that is.. files that rarely/never change, regardless of session state, etc) served without the browser having to send cookie data (which is useless to static content anyway).