title: PHP: using WWW-Authenticate without requesting a password
body: <p>I'm tasked with fixing a web application that uses a javascript prompt() to get a name from a user as a pseudo-password -- I'm converting it to use php's www-authenticate functionality because (a) it's not ideal that anybody can see all of the passwords by viewing the source, and (b) some IE versions disable the prompt() function, which breaks the app for them.</p>
  
  <p>However, since the users are primarily aged 60+ this needs to be as unconfusing as possible, and the fact that they're being asked for a username and password is likely to cause some confusion. Is there a way to only request a username? Or to be able to format the server realm message a little nicer so as to provide instructions to not fill out the password field? Anything?</p>
  
  <p>I would very much like to avoid using an HTML form for this, if at all possible</p>