Protect links

[Martin Schneider]

Hi!

I want to maintain a large file link list (to legal files, by the way
:-)). The links should be protected from "grabbing", though.

Is it possible to make the browser download a link without making the
link itself public? Passing through the data is not an option due to
legal issues in Germany, not mentioning the traffic.

Thanks for your ideas and best regards,
Martin

[David E. Ross]

On 1/18/2008 4:17 AM, Martin Schneider wrote [in part]:

I want to provide links to, for example, rare drivers. I cannot host
them myself as I don't have the copyright holder's permission (yet). So
I want to link to them.

Later, if the project is accepted by the community, I may sell banners
or something.

Actually, rehosting someone else's Web content -- even with permission
from the owner -- is often a poor idea.

Content is often updated. If you rehost, then you must update the
content yourself, which requires monitoring the originals.

If you merely link to the other Web pages, you automatically provide the
updates when the links are visited. Then, the only updates you must do
involves ensuring that the links are still valid. If the links are no
longer valid, it's quite possible that the content itself was
problematical.

--
David Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>

Have you been using Netscape and now feel abandoned by AOL?
Then use SeaMonkey. Go to <http://www.seamonkey-project.org/>.

[Martin Schneider]

Jukka K. Korpela schrieb:

You have now wasted a total of several hours of people's time spent in
reading this thread and trying to understand what you are trying to do
and even helping you there.

In a word, the idea is absurd. Make your living some other way.

I asked for a technical advice, not for your consent to my business
model. So if you don't want to give any, that's perfectly fine.

Best regards,
Martin

[Darin McGrew]

Jukka K. Korpela schrieb:

>In a word, the idea is absurd. Make your living some other way.

Martin Schneider <ma************ **@illusion-factory.dewrote :

I asked for a technical advice, not for your consent to my business
model. So if you don't want to give any, that's perfectly fine.

That looks like very sound technical advice to me.

See also http://www.htmlhelp.com/faq/html/publish.html#hide-url
--
Darin McGrew, mc****@stanford alumni.org, http://www.rahul.net/mcgrew/
Web Design Group, da***@htmlhelp. com, http://www.HTMLHelp.com/

"I've cut this board three times, and it's still too short!"

[Steve Swift]

Martin Schneider wrote:

Is it possible to make the browser download a link without making the
link itself public?

No, but you can hide your links from simple observation by using
something like:

<A HREF=http://www.playboy.com onClick="locati on.href='actual
location';retur n false">You cannot see where this goes</A>

Most browsers won't display where that link will actually take you. You
have to put something in place of 'actual location', of course.

You can even encode the 'actual location' so that the browser ends up at
the right place but casual observation of the HTML source won't tell you
much.

Of course, people without JavaScript enabled will end up at Playboy
instead of where you wanted them to go. Or on our Intranet you end up in
"Intranet Jail" because the DNS server blows the whistle on anyone
foolish enough to attempt to get to one of the "naughty sites".

--
Steve Swift
http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html
http://www.ringers.org.uk

[Stan Brown]

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 07:19:01 +0000 from Steve Swift
<St***********@ gmail.com>:

No, but you can hide your links from simple observation by using
something like:

<A HREF=http://www.playboy.com onClick="locati on.href='actual
location';retur n false">You cannot see where this goes</A>

Most browsers won't display where that link will actually take you.

And many won't be able to use that link.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/200..._wont_help_you

[Steve Swift]

Stan Brown wrote:

And many won't be able to use that link.

Many? I think it will affect only people with JavaScript disabled, and
whilst the numbers might be quite large in absolute terms, as a
percentage this is minuscule (at least on the pages where I bothered to
record statistics). Whilst I understand the motive for disabling
Javascript, you can't get far without encountering problems these days,
if you do.

I would guess that fewer than 1% of the people who use browsers even
know how to disable JavaScript. And I'm basing my estimates on my usual
target audience - a very large technical/commercial company, whose
employees should be significantly more savvy than the average.

I've heard of tribes whose counting systems have only three numbers:
one, two, many :-)

--
Steve Swift
http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html
http://www.ringers.org.uk

[Steve Swift]

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

Quite a wild guesser you are, aren't you?

Indeed so, but in 15 or so years of running a webserver with a target
audience of a few hundred thousand users, I've never had one mention of
things that didn't work with JavaScript disabled, despite there being
places (admittedly few) where this was the case. It's called experience.

I would bet that you expect the sun to come up tomorrow based on a
comparable level of experience.

So what did you intend to achieve by creating a JavaScript-only page or
a JavaScript-only pseudo-link, for example?

I gave the OP the closest answer to the stated request. My solution hid
the URL's from more potential users than any of the other posts. I'm
rather pleased with my efforts and am at peace. I hope you are too, but
I worry that you may not be.

--
Steve Swift
http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html
http://www.ringers.org.uk