We<font class="i" color="#ffffff"> j</font>hate<font class="i" color="#ffffff"> j</font>spaces



  • I was browsing a online store for a Swedish company and wanted to copy a description for a merchandise but the text that was pasted always contained several extra letters, mostly i, l or j so I took a look at the sourcecode.

    PLAYSTATION 3 (PS3) computer entertainment<font class="i" color="#ffffff">i </font>system<font class="i" color="#ffffff"> j</font>combines state-of-the-art technologies
    <font class="i" color="#ffffff"> l</font>featuring<font class="i" color="#ffffff">j </font>Cell,<font class="i" color="#ffffff">j </font>a<font class="i" color="#ffffff"> j</font>
    processor jointly developed by IBM,<font class="i" color="#ffffff">i </font>Sony<font class="i" color="#ffffff">i </font>Group<font class="i" color="#ffffff"> l</font>and
    Toshiba Corporation, graphics processor<font class="i" color="#ffffff"> i</font>(RSX) co-developed<font class="i" color="#ffffff"> i</font>by NVIDIA<font class="i" color="#ffffff">j </font>
    Corporation and<font class="i" color="#ffffff">l </font>SCEI, and XDR memory developed<font class="i" color="#ffffff"> l</font>by Rambus<font class="i" color="#ffffff"> j</font>Inc.

    Now thats some creative anti web scraper technique, excepts that all you needs to do is to filter out anything with a "i" class attribute. Unfortunately it also means that the spaces between words have a bit of different width. Lets just hope that no blind people with a screenreader comes and tries to order something.

    The site in question is http://www.webhallen.com/prod.php?id=42321, it is in swedish despite the .com suffix. 



  • A waste of time (just type out the description if you want)? Absolutely. Accessible? Hell no! But creative? Quite, but if they were really smart they would've done it with JavaScript on page load. Then again, if they were really smart they wouldn't have done this in the first place :)

    Link for the anti-copy-and-paste/Mouse Gestures brigade (never know if there's a anti-scraper behind it)



  • I've seen something like that in a triva IRC room. The hidden characters make it difficult and annoying
    to copy and paste into a search engine, I guess, in order to discourage cheating. As a method to prevent
    "stealing" of content, though, it totally fails.



  • well, it is an interesting way to get around using spaces, though it must've been hard for the coder to manually type it all out.



  • I've seen something similar used by people who don't know what an nbsp; is, but that's just dumb. As you say, easy to filter out, they're not even very good at this WTFish behaviour, they could have made it far more difficult.

    Of course, "the real wtf is..." (cliché #43) that soemone thinks that they'll actually sell a PS3!!



  • Bwahaha, very creative.

     Also, that description could probably use some work, in my opinion.  If I'm looking at the product page for a PS3, the last thing I probably care about would be that the processor was jointly devleoped by IBM or that the XDR memory was developed by Rambus.



  • @Saladin said:

    ...If I'm looking at the product page for a PS3, the last thing I probably care about would be that the processor was jointly devleoped by IBM or that the XDR memory was developed by Rambus.

    Sony doesn't have much else to sell you on other than impressive technical specs. Call of Duty and RFOM do not a console make. Although they do highlight the Blue-Ray playback support, which is primarily why we bought one (cheapest HD-format player on the market at the time)


Log in to reply