Logout from HTTP Authorization

This is a little trick to create a logout from your site if you are using HTTP Authentication. I am using it for a current project I'm working on where cookie based sessions won't reliably work. We (Derek Andriesian and I) are using HTTP Authenticaton to log into an account which is only accessed through javascript and image urls from other sites. Some browsers disallow cookies being set by sites other than the current one, so keepig the user logged in is not always possible using cookie-base session management.

To use HTTP Authentication you just do this in your PHP:

This works pretty good, however, there is no built in way to log a user out short of making them close their browser. But, you can "log them in" with a different username and password encoded into the link like so: http://username:password@www.domain.com/page.php. So, it's possible to create a logout page by sending them to a link http://x:x@www.domain.com/logout.php. Then you may redirect them somewhere else, and as long as you don't have a user with a username and password of 'x' and 'x' then they will be logged out of any valid account.