web object - load page - send login

[sferguson]

...trying to display/embed web page that requires a user name and password to login

displaying a non-password protected page, or the login page, is no problem, but how might I submit the user name and password automatically so the "welcome" page is the first and only page displayed?

[Corey]

I saw this today, might help http://www.indigorose.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=23375#post23375

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software (http://www.indigorose.com)

[eric_darling]

I have no connectoin with the company I'm pointing you to, nor do I have any experience with their product(s). Still, it sounds interesting... YMMV.

http://www.atompark.com/index.htm

[Corey]

I advise against usage of that product for a variety of reasons, especially if reliability and performance are important to you, or extra especially on any web site which you are attempting to promote or get ranked.

To get a sobering taste of just the performance issues, go click on their samples. See that innocent looking little 1-3 second delay. Well times that by every page on your site and every visitor. Then consider that server performance degrades exponentially as resources are used, i.e. that will turn into a 4-6 second delay for even broadband users on any busy site. Here's the big rub, *not just on your protected pages* either because that's server side, so *all pages* are slowed...

One more thing Eric, their help page link goes 404. That is not a good sign my friend. :) If you do wish to encrypt HTML despite my warning there are several free solutions which are superior to this specific product in my opinion based upon what I've seen.

In this case sferguson has already password protected his page, he is only seeking to pass authentication data, AMS handles that fine. :)

As to the word on this topic, use your server's native functions (i.e. Apache) to password protect pages only. No exceptions, that's what all the top web developers and tech companies in the world do. Easy to do with most servers and that's as good as it's going to get for efficacy, reliabilty, and performance. Any CGI will not run as well as a server module...

And on the topic of source code obfuscation, take your chances, weigh the risks. Personally I prefer making it as easy as possible for search engines to get at everything I have. In addition you aren't protecting your content anyhow. Anything which gets served without server authentication can be leeched. If what you are attempting to protect is not your content at all but rather the HTML code itself then you need to get out more often. :)

No, but seriously Eric if you would ever like to execute some code privately just add it as PHP and let your server wrap it automatically, in which case the end user's HTML source code will only contain an instance of the results of that code executing not the actual code. I can't think of a single valid reason to try and hide your markup.

One last point. Anything which can be viewed by a browser from one site can still be viewed from another site. So for example go to their web site and view a sample. Now "VIEW > SOURCE" (IE) on their sample page itself and then cut and paste that to an HTML page and run it locally, you'll see that it serves the page perfectly. So that product is not even protecting your markup from unauthorized usage. And it's certainly not protecting it from being edited either because you can simply do "FILE > SAVE AS > Web Page complete" and then you have a full local instance of that markup [including images] for editing, i.e. in Dreamweaver.

I think they rely on a misunderstanding of what HTML is to create sales.

The rule of thumb on this is to go to the site of someone who you know for a fact has extensive internet site design and operation experience and access to all the latest tools, and then take a look at what they are using. In this case you would %99.999 of them serving straight HTML and using their servers to protect pages. Anyhow thanks for the link Eric, I needed a good rip. Hey did anyone notice anything different about our site tonight? [5.0 is up]

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software (http://www.indigorose.com)

[eric_darling]

Anyhow thanks for the link Eric, I needed a good rip.

Heh heh... I guess so. Anyway, you're welcome! Thanks for your .05 too!