Re: Hiding email addresses in an accessible way

The best solution would be to use a server-side script for sending the
email to the desired person/department.  This way NO client-side version
of the email address exists to be harvested.

For those of you in the US Federal Government, this could also be said:
"A good government web site will comply with Section 508 sub section
1194.22 (web applications).  The use of mailto: would not be as clean and
would require compliance with an additional sub section 1194.21
(client-side applications).  Web aps should be web aps, not web aps plus
client-side aps.

DB 

On Mon, 18 Aug 2003 14:00:33 +0100, "Scarlett Julian (ED)"
<Julian.Scarlett@sheffield.gov.uk> said:
> 
> Does anyone have any way of hiding email addresses from spidering that
> doesn't use javascript? We use a CMS and have no way of stopping content
> authors from using their work email address as a contact (and in the
> interests of open government we wouldn't want to anyway) which means that
> our organisation is opening itself to huge amounts of spam. If there was
> some bit of server-side witchcraft that we could use to obscure these
> from email harvesters then I would dearly love to hear it. I realise that
> we could use &#64; instead of @ in the mark-up but I'm petty sure that
> spiders are wise to this now. Obviously I'd rather not use client-side
> scripting if at all possible.
> 
> A couple of constraints: 
> the address must be a useable link (mailto: unless anyone knows any other
> way)
> the address must appear on the page so that non-IT-savvy users recognise
> that it is an email address i.e. no replacing "@" with "AT" or "." with
> DOT
> 
> Thanks all.
> Julian
> 
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> 
-- 
  Dwight H. Barbour
  .NET Community Builder
  Section 508 and ASP.NET Educator and Developer
  dbs@dbsolutions.net

Received on Monday, 18 August 2003 09:44:52 UTC