I love cookies. I will eat any kind of cookie, anytime, just about anywhere. Homemade chocolate chip cookies, warm and slightly chewy, are my favorite. But day to day, I eat
reduced fat Oreos as an after dinner treat. Yes, I do twist the cookie apart and eat the cookie side with the cream first and save the pure chocolaty cookie side for last.
Now there are cookies and then there are Internet cookies.
Internet cookies, unfortunately, are about as related to Chips Ahoy as bytes are to bites. But, to make it all more palatable, I have decided to cream the cyberspace concept into
something with texture and flavor.
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary says that “cookie” is a variant of “cooky” which originated from the Dutch word koekje or cake. Cookie, by definition, is a small or
slightly raised cake.
I thought that the Internet cookie developers must have had a sense of humor and borrowed the term cookie as a small, sharable confection that would only use a few
bytes (bites). But fat-free cyberspace is starved for a sense of humor. In a 1997 Builder.com article, the author, Paul Bonner, quotes Low Montulli, then a Netscape Client Product Division Manager, as saying, “A cookie is a well-known computer science term that is used when describing an opaque piece of data held by an intermediary.” Pretty dry if you ask me!
So here is my rope bridge between these cookie worlds… To span the gap, I’ve used a tasty recipe for another of my favorite cookies.
The recipe in The Joy of Cooking for Ginger Thins, or “dot hearts,” which are tiny ginger cookie bites, begins with 3/4 of a cup of butter…
Internet cookies are 3/4 of a cup worth of a text file that a web server leaves on your computer. When your web browser (usually Netscape or Windows Explorer) contacts a web server for you, the web server says “hello,” and sends this Internet cookie back to you. Its text file is usually less than one kilobyte. Most cookie files contain a simple “name-value” pair, your user name and an ID number.
Back to the Ginger Thins recipe which calls for one cup of brown sugar… One reason why a web server wants to leave a cookie on your hard drive is that it makes your return trip to that site sweeter. If you return to a web site that has left a cookie, your browser sends the “name-value” information to the web site. The web site can then show you a custom welcome page which I think of as the cup of brown sugar. For example, JCrew, an online clothing store, might show me a page that says, “Hello, Dugan Maddux, Welcome back to JCrew” because they remember I was a big shopper last Christmas. If I want to purchase something, my cookie will allow JCrew to access the information I gave them last Christmas on “My Account,” my mailing address for instance.
One beaten egg… The cookie you store is a nest egg for the web site, too. The web site can “count” new visitors versus old visitors. It can determine how often a person visits the site. It can keep track of any personal information you provide by tying it to your unique cookie identifier.
1/4 cup of molasses… Cookies can stick around a long time. “Persistent” cookies are stored on your hard drive and remain there even after the browser is closed.
1/4 teaspoon of salt… You can throw salt on your cookies and delete them. If you use Microsoft, for example, you can go to your file directory and select the Windows file. Among your Windows file folders is a “cookies” file folder. You can open your cookie file and see all of the cookies stored there. You can selectively delete them one by one (byte by byte) or do a clean sweep.
1 1/2 cups of flour… It’s the flour that adds the bulk to the cookie dough. Like real cookies, Internet cookies can really pile up too, but Microsoft and Netscape, (two of the most popular web browsers) have a limit. For Microsoft it is about 300 cookies. When you reach your limit, the cookie that has been unused the longest is dropped to allow space for the new cookie.
1/2 teaspoon each of cloves, cinnamon and ginger… It’s the spices that get your attention when you bite into the real cookie. So your browser can be set to get your attention every time a website wants to leave a cookie. Then you decide whether you will accept it or not. A website can ONLY access its own cookie, not any other files. The cookie is merely a text file. It does not contain any executable code that can harm your other files. Stir the ingredients together and drop by 1/8 teaspoons onto a greased cookie sheet. Bake for 5 minutes at 325 degrees and you will have approximately 300 byte-sized cookies ready to delete with the help of your friends!