This is a PICS extension in the http://www.w3.org/PICS/extension URI space. It is based on the PICS Cookie Extension note. This indicates no endorsement of its content, nor that the Consortium has, is, or will be allocating any resources to the issues addressed by the NOTE.
Comments on this document should be sent to <djaye@engagetech.com>.
The goal of the cookie block (cookieinfo) extension is to provide an association between the PICS label and one or more HTTP cookies. The cookieinfo extension builds upon the PICS 1.1 for and gen options to provide this link. Specifically, the cookieinfo extension provides a mechanism for enumerating the HTTP cookie names to which the label applies. The for and gen options are used to determine compatibility with the domain and path attributes of the cookie as described in <ftp://ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-http-jaye-trust-state-01.txt>Trust Mechanism for State Management. In addition, the cookie block indicates that this label applies to cookies in the response header and not to the URI being requested. If no cookie names are enumerated, then the label applies to all cookies compatible with the for and gen options.
The following syntax of the cookieinfo extension is written in modified BNF. By convention, '*' indicates 0 or more instances of the token that precedes the special character, '*1' indicates 0 or 1 instance of the token, and '+' indicates 1 or more instances of the token. The Quoted strings are case sensitive but other literal elements are case insensitive.
cookieinfo-ext ::= 'extension
( mandatory "http://www.w3.org/PICS/extensions/cookieinfo-1_0.html"' cookiename* ')'
cookiename ::= as defined in
<ftp://ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-http-state-man-mec-04.txt> State Management Mechanism (Rev1).
each cookiename should be quoted to be compliant with the PICS Specification.
The following example shows a valid cookieinfo extension is applied to a http cookie named "custid":
extension ( mandatory "http://www.w3.org/PICS/extensions/cookieinfo-1_0.html" "custid" )
In this example, we begin with the extension ( mandatory tokens which identify this extension as an mandatory extension to the PICS label within which it is contained. This declaration is followed by a URL, http://www.w3.org/PICS/extensions/cookieinfo-1_0.html, which provides a unique name for the extension. De-referencing the URL provides human readable information on the extension. Finally we have a quoted cookie name value indicating the specific http cookie to which the label applies.