how do you disable "view source" button?

[apsadmin]

maturi,

You are right, of course. But I will have to maintain my point that they do not know these tricks. I have worked with these people, and I know. They hire the help, and most can't afford to do so to satisfy a simple curiousity. Not only that, but most of the site has been built in photoshop, with most of its text contained in graphics, which defeats any basic users attempt to highlight, then copy the text. With the addition of disabling the source button it should give him some relief.
Anyone else?

[HardCoded]

I hope you're not feeling picked on, but...

most of the site has been built in photoshop, with most of its text contained in graphics, which defeats any basic users attempt to highlight, then copy the text.

This also disables the people you want to read the text from reading the text. Namely Google et al.

There is NO JavaScript way to disable View Source in the menu bar. There might be a way with VBScript but I'm no VBScript user. Best do a search on it.

Here's a list of methods that *will* work:
http://www.vortex-webdesign.com/help/hidesource.htm

In all seriousness, given the people you are targeting, it might be effective enough to put all your stuff in framesets and disable the context menu

<script>
  document.oncontextmenu=function(){ return false; }
</script>

Then your tailors will have to view source on the frameset, get the frame src, then paste that in the browser, view source on that, etc.

But generally you are way wasting your time that would better be spent on SEO.

Here's another example of a waste of time. Yellow Pages sites in Canada and the States go out of their way to make their stuff non-browseable and non-spiderable. Who does that hurt? Just them, since Google has absolutely no way of spidering their stuff either. They could have increased the traffic to their sites by at least five times. Suffice it to say I have a database of 1.3 million Canadian businesses (i.e. all of them, or at least all of them that have businesses phone numbers) gleaned from a spider I wrote in about three hours.

My long-winded point: in general, these types of tricks do more harm to you than they benefit, since they don't fulfill the originl intent. Ever.

[spice]

Sounds like you're trying the wrong solution to a problem here. If you're worried about tech-illiterate people stealing your code, why not instead make it highly unattractive for them to do so? Write code that detects the server running it... if it's not yours, it throws up a big message like "This code is stolen." So now your competitors are showing a big unfriendly unprofessional message to all their visitors. Should put a stop to that sort of thing real quick.

Having text rendered as graphics is a pretty stupid idea for a lot of reasons, including the ones already mentioned.

[bMind]

There is another way you can do this is to encrypt your code. You will then only see encrypted characters from the source code. I am not too sure how it would affect your search engine ranking but you may find HTML encryption softwares everywhere that you can download for free. If your site is done in PHP programming and you want to take the risk to encrypt your code, I have a file that you can use. All you need to do is put the file in your server somewhere and include the file in every single one of your php file that you want to encrypt, it will then do the work.

[splinter]

You guys might find this discussion interesting. It's very long.

http://www.codingforums.com/showthre...?t=4437&page=1

[sfowler]

I think if they are too tech illiterate to copy the text out from the browser, then the source code is not going to mean much to them anyway. Just copying out a single page is not very helpful, since everything points into Nirvana. Just put all absolute links on the page and they will end up with their customers landing on your site!