Learned, but completely forgot about this. What remained was a vague suspicion that perhaps the benefits of clear type separation that would be lost by using a

Learned, but completely forgot about this. What remained was a vague suspicion that perhaps the benefits of clear type separation that would be lost by using a plain string might not necessarily be worth it. (and then you eventually start rolling your own and then one day someone goes wild with the allowed characters liberties within the username:password prefix...) To sum things up: never ever use java.net.URL, it's a bad http client and it's worse at everything else you might expect it to be.