Missing cookie in IE 6, 7,and 8

I'm sending 2 cookies to the browser. One is a browser identifier which expires in 1 year, and the other is a session tracker without an expiration. The response headers for a fresh request look like this

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
X-XSS-Protection: 0
ETag: "b502a27282a5c621f34d522c3fcc8e3e"
Set-Cookie: bid=ahFmaXJld29ya3Njb21wdXRlcnIPCxIHQnJvd3NlchimigcM; expires=Fri, 12-Aug-2011 05:21:55 GMT; Path=/
Set-Cookie: rid=1281569589; Path=/about
Expires: Wed, 11 Aug 2010 23:33:09 GMT
Cache-Control: private, max-age=345600
Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2010 23:33:09 GMT

I'm trying to access both cookies from JavaScript on the page.

In Firefox and Chrome document.cookie gives me this

"rid=1281568223; bid=ahFmaXJld29ya3Njb21wdXRlcnIPCxIHQnJvd3Nlchj2nAYM"

In IE6, IE7, IE8 document.cookie only gives me this

"bid=ahFmaXJld29ya3Njb21wdXRlcnIPCxIHQnJvd3开发者_如何学PythonNlchj2nAYM"

Is the 'path' attribute in my rid cookie throwing off IE or would it be the missing expiration date (which I thought was supposed to be optional)? I assume it is not the fact that I'm setting more than 1 cookie, because that's done all the time.

IE will only allow you access to those cookies if you are in a subdirectory! So if you set the cookie's path to be /about, and your page is actually /about then you cannot access it.

So it seems for IE you can access the cookie on pages beneath /about like /about/us but not on a page that is /about itself. Go figure :/

Alexis and Rishi I think have this spot on. And this is the only place on the web I've found this information on how IE treats cookies with paths. And what a ball ache! IE strikes again.

Incidentally, in IE 11 at least, it performs a 'starts with' comparison on the full path, so setting a cookie with a path of '/abou' can be accessed on the '/about' page. Though in my current project, this is little consolation, as I'm not in the position to make the assumption that taking one character off the end of the path will reliably identify unique paths in a site.

I also am having a similar issue with IE. I'm setting three cookies without a path (so assumed to be "/"). I am running in a dev envronment on my own machine. When I open the page as http://localhost/page.aspx, I get the expected result and my javascript can find the cookies, however, if I load the same page as http://mymachine.mydomain.com/page.aspx I can watch (in the debugger) the same three cookies being added to the response, but when I get to the javascript function that looks for them, all my cookies are null. Needless to say, this works ok on FireFox.