Re: Using Character Sets to Hide Email Addresses From Harvesters

> 
> How accessible is hiding email addresses in character sets for speech

numeric entities, not character sets - there is only one possible set,
here, Unicode.

> readers and other devices.  I would like to at least attempt to hide email
> addresses from email harvesting bots.  For instance, the following is this

Any technique that is significantly used will be worked round.  Remember
that spammers have been using entities to obfuscate URLs for a long time,
so their original thinkers are familiar with this technique.

> not be smart enough to recognize it as an email address.  Of course, it
> won't work in a mailto:.  So does leaving the anchor tag out with the

The browser is broken if it doesn't work in href attributes.  In fact the
normal mistake is not to use an entity where one is mandatory.

Using entity codes below 256 should work on all but the most broken
browsers (although those above 127 may be misinterpreted as being in
the document transfer character set, rather than in ISO 8859/1 (8 bit
subset of Unicode)).

Received on Monday, 3 December 2001 20:13:32 UTC