Introduction > About HTML Guard

You, as a web designer or developer know the expense entailed in keeping up a website. You also know how easy it is the copy and reproduce a website's content. A few clicks are all it takes to grab text, images, and interesting pieces of HTML code, and use them somewhere else. Time and again, even complete websites are stolen and published elsewhere. It's not only beginners who often succumb to the temptation to use the web as a self-service convenience store and free source of any type of content.

Of course, you can always take legal action against the pilfering of your pages - there are intellectual property laws to protect you. However, taking this route requires considerable time and expense, and a successful outcome is in no way guaranteed.

Now, with HTML Guard, there is a technical solution to stop thieves in their tracks. Our software uses encryption to protect your site's source code and also gives you multiple options for restricting the browser's functionality. For example, you can use HTML Guard to block the context menu on your pages, deactivate the print function and prevent text and images from being selected with the mouse.

HTML Guard specifically contains the following functions to protect your website's pages:

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Source Code Encryption
Encrypt the source code of your files without affecting the way in which they display in a browser. A wide array of settings leaves it to you to decide which parts of your HTML files to encrypt. For example, you might want to protect only email addresses to stop them from being harvested by spammers - or you might want to encrypt your entire site.

•	Source Code Compression Put your source code on a diet and eliminate unneeded spaces, line feeds, comments and other hogs. This reduces the time that your page needs to load, while making it harder for outsiders to read and use.

•	Disabling the right mouse button Prevent the context menu from being launched by right-clicking in a browser window. This limits the possibilities for copying and saving images, text and links with the right mouse button.

•	Disabling the selection of text and images Prevent text and images from being selected with the mouse and subsequently copied.

•	Disabling Internet Explorer 6's image toolbar Hide Internet Explorer 6's image toolbar that appears when hovering over an image and that facilitates saving, printing, or transferring an image by email.

•	Disabling the print function Disable the browser's print function, so that users trying to print your site see only a blank page.

•	Disabling the "Save as…" function in Internet Explorer Interrupt Internet Explorer's "Save as…" function by displaying an error message.

•	Disabling the display of link addresses in the status bar Prevent link addresses and other notifications from being displayed in the browser's status bar.

•	Disabling Adobe Acrobat's "Web Capture" function Keep your site from being saved in PDF format by Adobe Acrobat.

•	Disabling shortcut keys Block the use of common shortcut keys in the browser, such as those that display source code or allow saving of a site.

•	Restricting the use of pages outside your domain Restrict the use of your pages to your own domain, and allow them to be used only online.

•	Disabling framing of your pages on outside sites Prevent foreign websites from displaying your pages within their own, using the <frame> or <iframe> HTML tags.

•	Disabling indexing of your pages by search engines Direct search engines not to place your pages in their search indexes. This would keep your images from appearing in Google's image search, or keep your personal contact information from being found by anyone using a search engine.