Thursday, May 19, 2005

No right click

As a web designer or graphic artist you want your work to be seen and appreciated, but don't want it to be purloined and someone else to get the credit for your hard work. A quick search on the WWW, or a basic knowledge of Javascript and lo! you have the facility to disable the right click functionality and safeguard the fruits of your labour.

Well all seems fine and dandy, but you may just have alienated a proportion of your potential audience. Using the right-click has more functionality than just 'stealing' your work, and some users will not appreciate being told how they are allowed to interact with your site.

The stateless nature of the hypertext transfer protocol requires that all the content of your web-page is downloaded and cached by the client computer - so trying to stop your user from saving your content is completely counter to all that the internet relies upon.

Even taking precautions such as the ubiquitous JavaScript option are so easily by-passed as to make the effort worthless. Consider the user (and there are lots of them) who have disabled JavaScript...

Even for the average user, just try the following:

Press and HOLD the right mouse button. The alert box will appear.

Press the Enter button and release. The alert box will disappear.

Release the right mouse button and the context menu appears.

Magic!

Just accept it - putting your work onto the WWW requires a certain willingness to let others see how you have acheived the results.

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

9th Annual Webby Awards announced

Webby awards are awarded by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and recognize excellence and innovation in Web Design.

The nominations and awards are a statement of the abilties of the web Design teams involved in the production of these sites: even being nominated is a boost. Who knows? Perhaps a NetDominus site may feature in a future Webby Awards list...

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Flaws in Firefox

Flaws have been identified in Firefox which may present a security breach. Although there is no evidence that these have been exploited, users should consider disabling Javascript until a patch is released.

Several security firms had identified the potential flaw, however the Mozilla foundation are pursuing an aggresive approach to resolving the issue.

Despite this embarrasing revelation, Firefox has recently celebrated its 50 millionth download, and this setback should not deter users from considering this very capable browser.

Additional reporting at the BBC website...

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Historical (Hysterical?) web pages

Ever re-design your web-site to ditch that horrendous colour scheme/ code/ logo...

Thought that it had gone to that great 'server in the sky'?

Just when you thought it was safe to start lauding your new all-singing, all-dancing web-site, along comes the Internet Archive and their Wayback Machine.

Just type the url of a site into the form and browse back through the archived pages you thought would never again grace the browser page. AAAAARGH!

Console yourself by looking at everybody elses sites though.
Copyright © NetDominus