[thelist] how do we hide contents?

Danny Goodman dannyg at dannyg.com
Tue Dec 10 19:42:01 CST 2002


In my experience, the amount of effort most content authors put into trying
to hide/obfuscate their HTML/CSS/JavaScript code is inversely proportional
to the code's quality or uniqueness. As in the cited case, the few minutes
it took to get the full HTML written to the page (accumulated in variable u)
was a waste of time. And after the author went to all the trouble to create
the hidden _and_ offscreen div element to keep clearing the IE
(Windows-only) clipboard (sigh). The raw URL also locks up IE5/Mac, but
that's another story.

If you want to put an oncontextmenu block to keep little Justin (in my day,
it was Johnny) from turning your low-res digital art into his Desktop
wallpaper through a couple of mouse clicks, that may be OK (although it also
disables completely innocent actions that users may want to perform, so I'm
not a fan of such blocking). Just keep your expectations of "security" in
line with reality. I fear more for unsuspecting clients who buy into
client-side code lockdown promises that are not foolproof.

Protect your valuables through copyright (including illustration
watermarking) and vigilance.

Danny
http://www.dannyg.com

>
> The question you really have to ask yourself is, is it worth the effort?
> What are your goals in protecting your code? Is it *really* so
> groundbreaking that people would want to steal it when there so many
> royalty free scripts out there?




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