unicode and html 3.2

hiding email addresses using unicode

[AlwaysLearning]

hello all,
i'm brand spankin new here and just want to comment on what a great site this is. i'm still relatively new to this, but like creating web sites and think this is an awesome resource. at any rate, my question. i'm trying to avoid spam for the new site i created and stumbled across uni-coding my email addresses. i read in this forum that in order for this to work, it needs to be viewed in a browser that supports html 3.2. i'm gonna go out on a limb and assume that the majority of browsers do this, but does anyone have a list of browsers that do/do not support this? whichever list is shorter would be great. i just want to make sure that if i'm gonna go and uni-code all these email addresses, i;m not leaving out a significant portion of the population. actually, a simple answer of "you're fine" would suffice. thanks in advance. the new guy.

[takagi]

Netscape Navigator 3 already supported most of HTML 3.2 and some 5 years ago HTML 4.0 was implemented in both Netscape Navigator 4.0 and Internet Explorer 4.0. So I guess no problem for 99.9% of your visitors. On the other side, I would prefer a gif-file with the email address. Certainly in the long term, unicoding an email address won't prevent bots from harvesting the addresses on your site.

[AlwaysLearning]

could you please explain how to do this without using an html piece of code that bots can detect. Thanks.

[takagi]

In the left-upper corner you can see the logo of this site. You and I can easily read 'WebmasterWorld.com' but for a bot it is just an image. If you make a gif file with some human readable text on it being your email address, then the your visitors can read it, type the address in their favorite email program and send you some email.

[AlwaysLearning]

ok, i guess i misunderstood. i thought that you could click on the gif file and it would send you to the your default email and prepopulate the "To:" field. but you're saying that you can just have the image and then they have to go to their email and then type it in. is there anyway to make the gif file clickable where it works like a "mail to" or is that just wishful thinking on my part? (obviously I would like know if there's a way to do this so the spammers can't find it with their tools).

[takagi]

You could add some JavaScript function to compose the address out of some sub-strings, but that will not work if JavaScript is disabled. Basically it is a trade off between making it hard to automatically collect email addresses and keep it easy for the visitors. If the 'to' field is prepopulated, the text has to come from your site and that makes it spiderable.

[bill]

The days of the Unicode/ASCII trick are numbered. I experimented with this on a Chinese site of mine, a real low traffic industrial site. The Chinese spam-bots got the plain encoded address within a week and by the end of the month I had to abandon that e-mail address and put up a new one behind a JavaScript encoder (Hivelogic), after which the spam dropped off to almost nothing.

[tedster]

For now, I agree that putting the address together on the client side with js variables still works. I've creating some very quiet email spaces with that approach.

[g1smd]

See also [webmasterworld.com...] and several other threads a week or so either side of that one.