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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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