Re: Show text without converting to html

On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 11:39 AM, Jack <JackListMail@gmail.com> wrote: > -----Original Message----- > From: Andrew Ballard [mailto:aballard@gmail.com] > > > The only people for whom the value will be obscure will be the humans who actually try to read > the HTML source code itself. Neither web browsers nor harvesting scripts won't have any trouble > reading it. > > Andrew > > > Andrew, > > One other note, if the link doesn't say mailto: a > harvester will have to decode the entire page in order to find the mailto, do you think that’s > happening.  This could be one of those things where you help against a percentage of harvesters, > and not others. > > J It will protect against a (possibly large?) percentage of those that are looking for the lowest hanging fruit. I have a few reasons that feed my doubts about its effectiveness: - The most common answer you find when you search for e-mail obfuscation is something similar to what you've shown, whether it uses HTML character entities, numeric entities, or a combination of the two. - The overhead to convert frankly isn't that high. I realize that in the case of a harvester you are multiplying that overhead by the sheer volume of content being processed, but given the speed of processors I don't think that matters much anymore. - There are simple ways to minimize the overhead. For example, a script does not have to decode an entire page; it only has to look for anchor tags and decode the contents of the href attribute of each tag found. Combine these and I don't think this obfuscation technique adds enough cost to be much of a barrier. Of course, this is just my opinion. Those who write harvesters might be lazier than I give them credit. Andrew