slowly understanding sessions

Anon

hello. Well, i just wrote a simple page including session stuff. (can't believe it but i actually am figuring it out). Now though, is there a way to get that sesion variable into a form? i.e, on the 3rd page of my personal site, i still have it showing their name, but I also want to put that in a form. Here is what i tried and i got a parce error from php
<html stuff>
<?
session_start();
echo "nice to see you now on this page $username. Sessions must be working!<br>";
?>
<form action = "nextpage.php" method=post>
<?
name <input type=text name=username value="username">
<some more form stuff......>
should i have <input type=text name=username value="$username"> ? or would that not make a difference

mmilano

yeah, you should have put: value=$username

once a session variable is registered, treat it like any other variable.

Anon

now if i wanted to take this a little farther, and actually do something useful with it like say a user signs up for, who knows, ... and gets one of those confirmation emails that has the url in it. I noticed most of those have the url plus something like
?userid=blahblahblah
how do i go about that? and also, this website i am on, has each link with ?user=whatever after it. Do sessions do this naturally and the links just arent showing that way on my page, or is there something special I have to do?