[whatwg] Solving the login/logout problem in HTML

[Philipp Kempgen]

Ian Hickson schrieb:
> On Tue, 25 Nov 2008, Julian Reschke wrote:
>> > 
>> > The problem is that you'd basically have to duplicate the entire form, 
>> > since login forms can be arbitrarily complex. If the bot has the 
>> > username and password, why not also give it the username field name, 
>> > password field name, and login script url? Just consider them part of 
>> > the credentials.
>> 
>> That works in theory, but doesn't scale.
>> 
>> For instance, we've been working on a search engine that scan internet 
>> sites that may require authentication. Configuring that login for each 
>> site would be a maintenance nightmare.
> 
> Well for a piece of software of that scale, parsing the document using an 
> off-the-shelf HTML parser and finding the first matching <form> element 
> and then applying normal HTML semantics to get to the form fields

Ugh.

   Philipp Kempgen