A couple of students have been asking if they can loadStrings() from password protected
websites. A quick test informs me that URLs with the form of:
http://username:password@host.domain do not do the trick..

It would be nice if they did but certainly not imperative..

this page provides an example of how to do this in java 1.2+
http://builder.com.com/5100-6370_14-1049444-2.html

generally this is something we'd probably support through a library. almost nothing uses
basic authentication anymore so it's probably of limited usefulness for the core library.

most user/password authentication schemes are done via cookies (any time that it's a
regular text field for loggin in, rather than a dialog box that pops up), which requires a more
complicated set of classes, which could also be implemented via a library.

nah, just send people to Apache HttpClient for this.