]OT] http-authorization:

[Don Russell]

Please forgive the OT nature of this, but I've spent a lot of time
googling etc and have found nothing. Perhaps someone here knows the
answer, or can point me in the right direction.

I have a web appl that uses status code 401 (authorization required) to
challenge the user for an id/password. The client then responds with the
http-authorization header etc. All is well.

But, I want to make a more 'friendly' log on page:
So, my server sends a page with status 200 (OK) with a simple form with
two fields: userid/password. (The rest of the page content is the
friendly fluff, not relevant to my problem)

In that case, when the user presses the submit button, the client
doesn't build the http-authorization: header (because it doesn't know it
should)

Is there a way (using javascript?) to tell a web browser (client) to
build a specific header?  This needs to work with MS IE6, and I'd LIKE
it to work with FireFox...

I need to have the client send the http-authorization: Basic
B64-encoded-uid:pwd header.

I can do the encoding "manually" in a script if there are no "built-in"
encoding methods... but how do I actually get the client to include a
specific request-header?

Thank you,
Don