susapra

Hi,

I stumbled across a product on the net which said that it would protect my html code, stop people viewing it, disable various things in my browser etc. I am a little dubious as I know many ways myself to get around these things and some of the disabling features are pointless half the time, but having said that id like to find out other peoples opinions and views and maybe recommendations.

Is there is any need to try to protect html code using these kinds of software? Does anyone bother and if they do, do they find it successful - or is it a waste of time?

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Grich

I haven't had many cases were I have had to protect my html code. I don't know why you would want to or how it would work. The only protection from viewing I do is keep the javascript in another file rather than in the html.

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Freaky Chris

Ye, thats quite common although offers very little protection for your javascript code anyway.

Chris

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Jimbo

Client-side code (HTML, JavaScript) is hard to protect since the client has to be able to use it; server-side code is protected simply because the client doesn't see it.

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grimpirate

It's very likely that it doesn't make your HTML code unviewable. What it likely does is obfuscate the code. Which means it makes it extremely complicated to read (assuming it's a good obfuscator), but still very viewable. You can't stop a client from viewing a page's source code. All you can hope to do is make the HTML code so ridiculously complicated/convoluted that there's no hope of them ever understanding it.

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MiKuS

i might as well add, why would you want to obfuscate html? you could still make javascript walk the DOM nodes and get a good idea of whats happening regaurdless of what you've done.. (bottom line is the browser needs to know whats going on, which means we can get the browser to translate from obfuscated to how it see's it)

i've seen html obfuscation before and it made me laugh, i just used the web developer toolbar to view generated source.
you should be worried about your server side scripts mainly...

cdingSpree

I can't agree with you more. So much in fact I have nothing left to say. Darn.