[tarequeh]

Really cool exercise in CSS. My first thought is that texts displayed using this font can't be selected/copied & won't be screen reader friendly. Might make for a great way to display your email or phone number on a site without worrying it would get scraped by marketers.

[sinaa]

Great idea. You could even generate a random mapping of the letters -> CSS classes on each load, making it very difficult for bots to decipher.

[aeosynth]

Would it really though? Bots can beat CAPTCHA.

[sinaa]

Obviously it won't make it impossible to decipher, just harder (and perhaps not worth the effort). If the line order of each statement is also randomized and useless attributes are added, they'd have to pretty much compile the CSS and compare the attributes.

The alternative way to beat all email obfuscation techniques is of course taking a snapshot and running OCR on it, but certainly not worth the effort/CPU time.

[developer1]

Not as much effort as you might think. Command-line rendering of html (including css and js) and taking a screenshot is not very difficult. If a site used this method, and someone is highly motivated to break that captcha, the effort put in would be nothing compared to the benefit of bypassing the "security".

[glomph]

They could just make a map of the class attributes. It would be easy.

[mintplant]

I thought this too at first, but then I realize that an image would do the job just as well.

[emitstop]

Seriously, this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Why are people pretending this would be useful in any way at all?

I see how its a fun exercise in CSS and everything, but actually providing it as a download as if people will use this productively is stupid.

[le_lenny_face]

>this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen

Lol obligatory XKCD!

http://xkcd.com/1497/

[kuschku]

And if you want an infinitely scaling image, you could even use an SVG.

[masswerk]

Actually, you could put a character inside the div and use the old "text-indent: -9999px;"-trick: Copy and screen readers fixed.

[gleenn]

Screen readers fixed, but how are you going to select to copy?

[emitstop]

If you can select to copy its no different than a screen reader. There's is 0 usefulness to this, and it's embarrassing that it's on the front page of hacker news right now.

[taivare]

I have been trying to find out if the single-stroke text used by 'Hershey'text extension in Inkscape is visible to screen reader's/scraper's/bot. This type of text font is used in Blueprint's.

[hrktb]

Nice idea. Even just preventing the information to get sucked up during search engine indexing and cached in the description can be a valuable side effect.