I've been screwing with this idea as a mental exercise. I saw someone create a script to do this on another forum, and I was thinking I could do it more thoroughly. The biggest problem I face with it is that I think the notion of restricting usability and disabling expected features on your site (That would be adding counter-intuitivity for lack of a better term) is a terrible one, but in learning javascript I thought it would be a fun project to tackle. So the big hump to get over is that this sort of script goes against everything that I believe in, but that does add an element of amusement at the same time.

I've managed to make a dreadful page from it, however. It's delightfully frustrating to use. It still needs some more work though. I'm convinced that with a little time and effort I can make the page even more difficult to use. I'm currently wanting to add another layer of un-usability to it, I figure that if I set the img src in the mark-up to blank (<img src="" alt="picture of whatever" />, I can parse the class attribute or the alt attribute or both to dynamically create the url of the image, and load it in. That would require the user to not only have to view source, but also poke around the script to find all of the pieces of the url. What's more is that I could set an attribute to a tag like the body tag, and use that as the path name to images that I wouldn't the user to steal.

I feel so dirty. But it's fun. But even still, it's hardly foolproof. The status bar in most browsers gives it all away, and the Activity Window in Safari provides one-click access to the image.

But it is a fun exercise, none the less. I