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If you stop
them from being able to download your pages like this then you also stop
them from being able to read your page at all so you may as well not
upload it in the first place.
With HTML
pages on the web, the only thing that you can do is to make things
harder for novices who might want to learn from your code, anyone who
wants to steal your code knows ways around all of the obstacles and will
still be able to steal your page. For example Right Click on the
screen her now.
The most
common thing that people do to discourage novices from viewing their
source code is to use a Javascript to disable the menu that displays
when you right click on the page. You can find scripts to do this on
just about any Javascript site and there are lots available on
Javascripts.com. Unfortunately, the view source option on this menu
is just a shortcut to the source and does not stop the user from
selecting the same option from the view menu in the browser menu bar.
Also there is nothing to stop visitors to your site from turning off the
Javascript support in their browser so as to bypass any scripts you
might have used.
Another
trick is to place a large comment (of fifty lines or so) in the top of
your source that advises that your source is protected and cannot be
viewed. Novices may not realize that they only have to page down to find
the source code.
Unfortunately, the way the web works, all of the images on our page are
also easily accessible along with the source code so there is no way to
protect these from being stolen either. The best that we can do is to
embed a copyright notice into the image itself which will hopefully
discourage visitors from stealing them.
A Solution
The only
real way to create web pages where the source cannot be viewed is to
not use HTML. HTML is designed so that it can be created in a text
editor and anyone with a text editor can read it.
Portable
Document Format (PDF) files can also be displayed in a web browser (and
display exactly as created rather than being rendered by the browser).
PDFs require Adobe Acrobat to be able to create fully functional web
pages and a freely available for download Acrobat Reader to be
able to render them on the screen (a plug-in allows PDFs to render in
browser windows).
Try to
access the PDF source using a text editor and all you see is a mess of
characters. Yes it is possible to extract the text from one of these
files with a large amount of effort but the formatting information is in
a totally unusable form. The only way to properly see the page complete
with all of its formatting is to use Acrobat Reader or the full Adobe
Acrobat product.
With
PDF you can even build security into your page that restricts what
people can do with your page (even if they have Acrobat) unless they
know one of two passwords. One password is used to stop the page from
being able to be opened at all by anyone who doesn't know it. The other
password can be used to stop people who are viewing the page from
performing one or more of the following: printing the page, changing the
page, selecting text and graphics, and adding or changing note or form
fields.
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