[thelist] secure/insecure elements

Andrew Clover and at doxdesk.com
Wed Apr 17 07:13:01 CDT 2002


Erik Mattheis <gozz at gozz.com> wrote:

> When requiring basic authentication for a directory (IIS 5), IE 5 Mac
> sometimes asks for the login multiple times as the page loads and it
> really irritates me ... I haven't noticed this with any other browser
> ... why does this happen?

My guess is that it asks you for the password for a subdirectory first, eg.

  http://www.example.com/images/wibble.gif

when you authenticate here, most browsers will not pass that authentication
to any object that is not a child of

  http://www.example.com/images/

so if you then have to fetch a password-protected object from, eg.

  http://www.example.com/pages/frame.html

the browser will prompt for the password again, for that directory.

To avoid this, make the user log in to a file in the root directory of
your site before attempting to access any protected files.

--
Andrew Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://and.doxdesk.com/



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