Using homemade DTDs to thwart site copiers

Idle musing....

[photon]

I was reading about DTDs today and wondered if anyone had ever tried creating their own. I don't have any experience with DTDs, but it occurred to me that using your own you could define

<div>

s to be

<span>

s,

<cite>

s to be

<input>

s, etc.

It wouldn't protect your content, but anyone copying your code would end up with something that rendered as gibberish.

Is such a thing possible/practical?

[encyclo]

Sadly, it's not practical because no browsers actually read the DTDs - they just render according to their own internal DTD, adapting to standards-mode or quirks mode as necessary. The only effect of the doctype is to permit validation and to trigger the display mode switch.

You can of course do what you want with XML rather than HTML, but try getting that indexed by Google (client-side XML is indexed as

text/plain

IIRC).

Nice idea though! ;)