Setting cookie in Internet Explorer 3.0? - html

Question

I'm having issues setting session cookies in Internet Explorer 3.0. Does anyone know if there is something special that needs to be done?
I'm doing with PHP, like so: setcookie('test', '1');
I'm not using a path or expiration time, is that necessary?
Perhaps someone has some old experience, or a 1997-1998 web development book laying around?
In case anyone is wondering why I'm bothering with this, because no-one uses IE3 anymore, and it's hard, yadda yadda, it's an art project.
Edit: Just to clarify, I have not tried setting cookies via JS yet, this is being done via HTTP.

Answer 1

I'm not sure the setCookie was around at this time. You could, however, use the older way of setting cookie which is
document.cookie = "someCookie=someCookievalue"
or
document.cookie += "someCookie=someCookievalue"
if you don't want to override cookie.
You can then retreive it using the document.cookie property. This will return a string of all the cookie. you can parse them using this function.
function parseCookie(cookiesString) {
var cookiesOutput = {};
var cookieKeysAndValue = cookiesString.split(';');
for(var i = 0; i < cookieKeysAndValue.length; i++){
var keyAndValue = cookieKeysAndValue[i].split('=');
cookiesOutput[keyAndValue[0]] = keyAndValue[1];
}
return cookiesOutput
}
document.cookie = 'someCookie=SomeCookieValue';
console.log(parseCookie(document.cookie));
I'm not 100% sure this will work since, you know, you are using Internet Explorer 3. But it is worth a shot.
If you need more information on that, you can consult the MDN doc
P.S. I tried to write something old javascript type as much as I could, but there still might have some errors. I already miss the modern browser feature.

Answer 2

So I've gotten to the bottom of this issue, and there were three causes for my confusion:
First, if you don't set a path= parameter for the cookie, IE3 will assume that the cookie is for this exact path only. This means that it will send back the same cookie when accessing /test.php again, but nowhere else on the site.
The solution is to include path=/ when setting the cookie.
Second, IE3 does not recognize cookies without an Expires parameter. The solution is to include Expires= in the Set-Cookie header, in "standard" cookie format.
The third is caused by the new Max-Age parameter, helpfully added by PHP for some reason, which IE3 does not recognize. Instead, it assumes everything up to and including Max-Age is the cookie name.
The solution is to set the cookie using PHP's header() function instead, like so:
header('Set-Cookie: test2=hi; expires=Tue, 02-Feb-2021 04:20:00 GMT; path=/');
(In this case, test2 is the name of the cookie, hi is the contents, and it expires about a year from today, on Feb 2nd.)