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List:       focus-ms
Subject:    Re: Hiding HTML code from being viewed.
From:       Paul L Schmehl <pauls () utdallas ! edu>
Date:       2001-11-21 19:47:07
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All this talk about hiding HTML and links has gotten me to thinking.  It's 
possible to display web pages using cgi.  What if you wrote all your web 
page links in Perl?

The links would be something like:
http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/yourhome/about.cgi, so that wouldn't 
tell you much.  The script itself could simply redirect to another script 
that generated the page or grabbed the content from another location and 
parsed it.  (I'm not sure why anyone would want to go to this much trouble, 
but maybe someone wants to play around with it?)

I can't see anyway to hide the HTML.  The browser has to be able to parse 
it, so the decoding algorithm for any obfuscated code would have to be 
available to the browser, and if it's available to the browser, it's 
available to the viewer.  A few lines of code will output the de-obfuscated 
code to a text file.

ISTM this whole idea is a general waste of time.  Web pages are, by 
definition, public content.  Content cannot be public and private at the 
same time - that's a contradiction of terms.

Anyway, that's my $0.02.

Paul L. Schmehl, pauls@utdallas.edu
http://www.utdallas.edu/~pauls/
Supervisor, Support Services
The University of Texas at Dallas
AVIEN Founding Member

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