Re: Accessibility of Pages Requiring Sign-In

> What does Cookie Authentication actually mean?  That you prompt users 
> for username and password, and if user submits correct credentials, you 
> start a session and store session ID (any kind of identifier) to a 
> cookie?  If so, you could also append the session ID to all the links. 
> [3] However, appending session ID information to the URLs may present 
> additional security issues. [4]

The difference is that you can cancel the session cookie independently
of the history.

Whilst cancelling the cookie is an advantage in some applications
when a user may be using a shared machine (although internet cafes really
ought to purge machines between users), I think the real reason it was
first invented was the normal one of wanting to be different from the
built in browser dialogue.