Appeal No. 2003-1031 Page 2
Application No. 09/050,841
The invention at issue on appeal shares "state information" across domains of
the Internet's World Wide Web ("WWW").2 Modern applications maintain state
information such as what a user was doing when he last ran an application or what he
prefers for his configuration settings. Because maintaining state information allows a
user to tailor an application to his needs, programmers have developed techniques to
add state information to the WWW. (Spec. at 1.) "Cookies" are one such technique.
More specifically, when responding to a client, a server sends a cookie for the client to
store. The cookie includes a range of Uniform Resource Locators for which it is valid.
Any future requests from the client to the server falling in that range will include the
current value of the cookie. (Id. at 2.)
A "virtual shopping mall" is an application that uses cookies. As a user browses
through a store of a virtual shopping mall and decides to buy certain items, those items
are added to a "shopping cart." More specifically, a list of the chosen items is kept in a
cookie file, i.e., the "shopping cart," of the user's Web browser, so that all of the items
can be paid for when the user finishes shopping within that store. (Id.)
2"The 'World Wide Web' . . . is that collection of servers on the Internet that
utilize the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP is a known application protocol
that provides users access to resources (which can be information in different formats
such as text, graphics, images, sound, video, Hypertext Markup Language--'HTML' etc.,
as well as programs)." U.S. Patent No. 5,796,952, col. 7, ll. 1-7.
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