Subj : Re: Javascript email hiding problem
To   : Stian Lund <stianlund@operamail.com>
From : Brendan Eich <brendan@meer.net>
Date : Tue Oct 21 2003 05:29 pm

Stian Lund wrote:

>Hello,
>On my website, I'm using a javascript routine to hide my proper email 
>address from the evil spambots. This page displays properly in MSIE 6 and 
>Opera 7.21, but renders totally wrong in Mozilla 1.5. Im using windows 
>2000 sp4.
>
>  
>

Wrong newsgroup, this is all about DOM level 0 and JS-in-HTML issues.

>Here's the page:
>http://stian.freeshell.org/contact.php
>
>I'm a total newbie to javascript, and there's probably something minor 
>I've overlooked, like escaping the quote marks or something. It looks to 
>me like Mozilla doesn't understand the last two lines, and thinks they 
>are 'outside' the script somehow, but this is only a guess...
>
>The script looks like this:
>
><script type="text/javascript">
>//<![CDATA[
><!--
>   var first = 'ma';
>   var second = 'il';
>   var third = 'to:';
>   var address = '&#115;&#116;&#105;&#097;&#110;';
>   var domain = '&#102;&#114;&#101;&#101;&#115;&#104;&#101;&#108;&#108;&#
>46;&#111;&#114;&#103;';
>   document.write('<a href=\"');
>   document.write(first+second+third);
>   document.write(address);
>   document.write('&#64;');
>   document.write(domain);
>   document.write('\">');
>   document.write(address+'&#64;'+domain+'</a>');
>// -->
>//]]>
></script>
>
>Of course, the domain var is on only one line.
>
>Hope anyone can spot what I'm doing wrong here...
>  
>

One suggestion: don't document.write a bunch of times, do concatenate 
strings and call document.write once.

If that fixes the bug, then you've found a Mozilla DOM bug to-do with 
how document.write interacts with the HTML parser.

The <!-- comment hiding hack looks ok to me, but I'm not sure about the 
CDATA marked section -- it starts after a //, which JS will take as 
comment-to-end-of-line, so it's not marking all the content of the 
script tag.  Will the HTML parser make the script element have two kids, 
a "\n//" text fragment (or maybe just "//" if the \n after <script ...> 
is swallowed as part of the begin-tag) and the CDATA section?  If so, 
then perhaps Mozilla is telling the JS engine to compile and execute 
only the first kid....

/be

>Thanks in advance,
>Stian Lund
>  
>

.