Over the years, we've had a number of clients who have become rather obsessive about protecting the source code to their web pages; usually they try to accomplish this by using a JavaScript Code Snippet that disables the right-click feature in most browsers. By doing this, my clients think that they are disabling the View Source feature, thereby preventing users from seeing the underlying HTML.
You may have noticed that the words disables and think are in bold - there's a good reason for this. First of all, you're not disabling the right-click feature; you're intercepting it and doing something else with it, such as displaying a modal dialog box that perhaps indicates to the visitor that your material is copyrighted. Although that may just be a semantic difference, there is no way to actually disable a browser function via HTML/JavaScript.
Secondly, they think they've protected their web pages, but the only thing they've really accomplished is annoying their visitors, because they can still go to their browser's Menu Bar and by clicking View|View Source (in IE anyways) they can easily view your source code. Another way to do this is to simply click File|Save As on the Menu Bar and you can download the entire set of HTML and image files! So much for protecting their web pages, right?
More importantly, let's think outside the box for a moment.you're not just intercepting the View Source menu item, you're also preventing the user from accessing at least 14 other Context Menu Items (again in IE - not too sure about Netscape these days). Now I can still go up to the Menu Bar to do what I need to do, but my first impression is always, What are they trying to hide? and Why are they trying to interfere with my browser ? This actually compels me to go through their source code with a fine toothcomb to make sure that there's nothing in there that's going to cause me problems down the road!
I've been developing web sites since 1994 and I can tell you that, while your content, images and proprietary source code are legally protected under various copyright acts and agreements in most countries (assuming of course that they are original works you've created), you really can't copyright the underlying HTML itself per se. Because of this, you're probably just wasting your time and needlessly aggravating potential customers by trying to over protect your pages.
If you really need to do this (and please believe me, you probably don't) you could purchase an HTML encryption tool that does a far better job of protecting your pages. The downside to this is that Search Engine Bots and Spiders probably won't be able to read and index your pages properly, which means poor SEO performance. These tools don't always work well in all browsers either, so you also risk crashing your visitor's browser or having them view a blank page - and that's not good for sales!
In all my years of experience, I've yet to encounter a single web page that had some incredible new way to use HTML or JavaScript that merited such protection; in fact, most of the JavaScript, images (and even the content sometimes) I've seen has been borrowed from someplace else - LOL!
Lastly, don't forget that if a visitor can view your web page (not the source code), they can still copy the images and text regardless of what you've done to protect them! In other words, don't waste your time, hard earned money or risk losing a sale - just take your chances and stop worrying so much.
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