This would have been the ultimate trump card back in the days when websites tried to prevent people from stealing their JavaScript and images by disabling things like right click and using twiddly bits of obfuscation. View source, eh? There is no source, punk!
Of course, the Link: header hadn't even been proposed yet, and the whole "DOM scripting" movement plus tools like Firebug/Webkit inspector has turned obfuscation of web content into a pointless exercise. So, like the author says, this is just a fun parlor trick.
Right, proposed in October 2010. It would have been unfair of me to pick on IE6 for not supporting it. The IE6 era is when I most vividly remember javascriptsource.com and friends touting things like onclick="alert('Not allowed!'); return false" as ways to "protecting" your content.
While it's certainly a neat trick, I wonder if there is any real world application to such techniques.
When I saw the title I expected to see something about using CSS for things other than styling HTML. It may be useful, for example, to use CSS to style native GUI applications or similar.
Similarly, full `Link` header support would also make it possible to have feed-autodiscovery on non-HTML pages (like images, audio, video, plain text files, etc).
That is very interesting, thank you. I hope the Link header gets wider support in the future. It seems that it could be very useful.
One idea is injecting some temporary content in all pages of a site without changing the actual content. For example in the recent SOPA blackout, server owners could have injected a css file with a simple configuration of their webserver.
Nice site. However you seem to be using CSS as it's intended: styling content.
The featured article uses CSS to generate the entire content, which I doubt is of any use besides showing off.
Would the functionality be possible if browsers wanted to make the functionality possible? I feel like this would be a big deal when it comes to the IP concerns of frontend code.
Your browser would still download the files. You can still the downloads using Live HTTP Headers, Firebug, Fiddler etc. to see what is going on in the background. So it would be like disabling right-click - deter only the least knowledgeable.
Using a tool outside of its intended scope can indeed yield interesting and unexpected results. Perhaps there is value in an exercise such as this, yet, I can't help but be put off by it. CSS is intended to separate document style from document content. I can't help but wonder what the author would think of seeing align="center" and its ilk back in HTML documents, since it's essentially the opposite extreme.
Of course, the Link: header hadn't even been proposed yet, and the whole "DOM scripting" movement plus tools like Firebug/Webkit inspector has turned obfuscation of web content into a pointless exercise. So, like the author says, this is just a fun parlor trick.