What is a cookie?
A cookie is a small text file stored on your hard drive by web pages you visit. The file and the information in the file - is generated by the server-side application running the web site. The server also has access to the cookie it gave you (but not to cookies created by other websites)
Why are cookies needed?
HTTP - the primary protocol used in web browsing to communicate with a web server - is an inherently stateless, session less computing experience.
That means that each page load, each request, is an independent event, unrelated to the events that come before or after it.
This is fine for viewing a few documents that someone put on their server, but anything more complicated - like logging in and getting user-specific content - requires some kind of persistence mechanism, something that will alert the server that the current request from you is related to the previous one, that they are both from the same person on the same computer.
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