Sessions and session data?

Question

Say you open a browser and go on a site, then you leave that site and go to another site. Would that be two separate sessions or not?

Also, what type of information is stored in session data?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes that would be.

Anything can be stored in sessions.

Web pages are disconnected medium. Unlike a program that exists on your hard drive once the page is loaded it for all practical purposes forgets about you unless the programmer stores info on your computer that can be accessed.

Imagine what it would be like if everytime you changed pages on a site like Amazon and you had to re-login and the shopping cart was emptied.

Have you ever hit the back button on your computer and had it say this session has timed out? That's a session variable that was set to a very short expiration time and the data it needs to display is no longer available.

You don't have to leave the same website for the data to be changed since each page is it's own entity.

Entire databases can be stored or something as small as a single letter. Most programmers try and restrict too much data from being placed in a session variable because it really slows down the website. there's other reasons besides that but you get the picture.