How can I automatically answer a password prompt from an embedded item in an (X)HMTL page?

Question

I have written a web page that displays images from several servers on my network via simple img tags with appropriate href values. The servers require authentication before they will send the images.

It works alright, except on first load the page presents the user with a series of password prompts (one for each server). The user can select the "Remember my password" checkbox, and then subsequent refreshes of the page work without prompting, with correctly updated images. That is, until someone closes out the browser, after which a new set of prompts awaits anyone who opens the page again.

All of the credentials needed are known beforehand, and I don't care if someone could read them in the page source, since this page is in a protected part of an internal intranet site. Everyone with access to this page knows the passwords anyway.

The only browser we're allowed to use is IE 7, so I don't care about compatibility with other browsers at the moment.

Is there any way I can use JavaScript (or some other client-side code) to automatically answer those prompts so the user never sees them?

Thanks very much, in advance.

Answer 1

You can include the authentication in the URL:

<img src="http://paulfisher:tastybacon@internalwebs/path/to/image.png"&gt;

Where, of course, paulfisher is my username and my password is tastybacon.

Answer 2

No, javascript can't do this. Here are a couple of options that I've used before to solve this problem:

1. Change the authentication on the other servers to be either anonymous or integrated.
2. Proxy in the images: On the server serving the page, add another page that takes in the URL of the remote server. This new page makes a webrequest to the other server and streams the image back. The webrequest can plug in the correct credentials.
3. Depending on the servers' DNS names, it might be possible to share an authentication cookie across all of the servers. Then you could set up some kind of module on all of the servers to allow the shared authentication.