Link, born to be bad.

SkyHook

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gordguide

It's normal to look at the referrer page when validating links.

The referrer page is part of the metadata that your browser sends every time is asks for a webpage. So, if you go from:

billybob.com/home to billybob.com/login

... then the login page can tell you were at billybob.com/home and it referred you. If you think about it, that's how web advertising works; they pay the referring site for clicks and they know the referring site because your browser tells them. Every browser works that way.

If you launch a page from your bookmarks, the one significant difference is the referrer is listed as "none" so they know you came from outside the site. Sometimes, that will result in the page refusing to deal with you the same way it would if you came from the page it expects you to come from.

However, in your case, look at the url (your abbreviated url doesn't show this, but the browser will in the address field)
... calgarypubliclibrary.com/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=account ...

You see the ipac.jsp part? dot-jsp is Sun Java (in particular,JavaServer Pages). This doesn't rely on the referrer, but the login is not really part of that page either.

The site calls a Java application on the library's server to get to the login screen; the login screen is not part of the web page itself. The web page is only a way to get to the login screen.

Note that, due to an unfortunate similarity in names, many people confuse Java with JavaScript. In reality, they are completely different altogether and have not one single thing in common besides the name.


Sun Java Developer: JSP



The "request" is clicking the "My Account" link on the page, and the "response" is the login window.

" ... simply hit return to re-enter the existing link that was linked to and now you're looking at the correct login page, even though the link hasn't changed at the input line ..."

Obviously they made more than one way to call the Java app.

__________________
"Being an artist doesn't take much, just everything you got. Which means, of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it's no big deal. They are one and the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it, I transcend all this gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission." —Hubert Selby, Jr.

SkyHook

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gordguide

" ... Briefly, you're saying that a link typed in manually, or selected in a bookmark list, always includes a blank referral? ..."

Yes.

__________________
"Being an artist doesn't take much, just everything you got. Which means, of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it's no big deal. They are one and the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it, I transcend all this gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission." —Hubert Selby, Jr.