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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Yeah -- I mean, it would be easy enough for browsers to not include text marked as display:none or visibility:hidden.

But there are so many other tricks to hiding text -- margin-left:-10000px, font-size:0, color:white, and so on, that there's really no way to avoid this.

So I can't even imagine how a browser extention would 'fix' this -- no matter how clever it tried to be, there would almost always be some way around it.

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It's a game of whack a mole, but that doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile game to play.

It strikes that Google probably has some algorithms to detect this. Otherwise black hat SEOers would use this trick to stuff keywords or something.

AFAIK Google fails to penalize you if there is any difference between your background and foreground colors, even if it's 1 unit (e.g. bg #000000 fg #010101). There's always a way around these things :)

OCR would work ;-)

Maybe... unless you figure out a trick to manipulate the OCR results with invisible, nearly-white gray areas in the image or so.

So, I know that was a joke, but now I'm trying to figure out why it's a bad idea.

The browser can generate some kind of map for which region of the screen is what font. If you don't have to guess the font, OCR should be easy and reliable. That takes care of the hidden text issue. But second, it means one would be able to copy/paste text that is in an image (because some web designers hate you).

But you don't select text by selecting an area technically, you select a sequence of characters.

You could do a per character visibility test at the time of copying, but sometimes you want to copy test that is not currently visible on your screen.

For example doing Ctrl+A in a document.

Yeah, That's a feature I'd like to have back again.

http://amiga-fish.erkan.se/amiga-fish-disk-968-content-Power...

The best option I can think of, which is not ideal, is to flash a message of the total copied text. This of course won't be very useful if you're copying a large amount of text but this sort of attack seems to require appending to the beginning of the text which should be easy enough to catch.

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