this isn’t a BP issue it’s a general web dev one and given the nature of how things work it isn’t possible nor should one try.
It’s often asked but the fact is that you can’t really consider CSS or markup as copyright or unique , you can’t stop people taking chunks of code or whole stylesheets and given that vast amounts of CSS is taken from elsewhere nowadays anyway makes it even more pointless.
No doubt someone will chip in with the usual scripts to prevent or obfuscate CSS but the fact is that you allow a browser to download these files so you can’t really prevent people copying stuff.
Images, copy, that’s another issue as these can be covered by ‘rights’ a set of layout graphics same thing you can forbid there use expressly as they represent a unique design and your graphics are automatically your property until you sign the rights to them away.
Oh and myspace copyrighting their CSS – stuff and nonsense it would never hold up.
thanks hnla,
yeah, internet is full of individual concepts, but issue is that most of them have negative comments. Probably, will have to live with an idea that, if someone want to steal css, he will get it at any level of security. However, some primitive method to block newbies is not the worst idea.
but how about php files, are all of them protected, or I have to add this empty index.php to every folder?
thanks.
Generally directories should have index options directive set to disable to prevent viewing a directory tree of files within it, when you see an empty index file in a directory it’s generally there as a safe guard as an index file would be served up if found rather than tree view of files if the option indexes is set to allow.
A php file is not possible to view as it can only be executed by the server.
A CSS file which essentially a plain ansi text file is always viewable from it’s directory http://example.com/styles/style.css
You can try and protect these sorts of files but for anyone with basic skill levels it’s fairly easy to circumvent protections.
@janismo I get what you mean. Perhaps set up a deterrent by importing multiple CSS files which are all compressed into one-liners and see how patient the other would be in transforming the one line into accepted format. Thing is, there are applications that can even copy and download whole websites lock, stock and barrel without requiring FTP passwords. In relation to this, there’s a website which has an extensive list of well-known websites beside screenshots/URL’s of reported sites which completely copied the original site’s design to a pixel, complete with stolen content.
thanks to both, something new is always highly appreciated. as I am new in php, question is not very important, simple interest of what happends in this area.
what I understand from firebug work is that it shows where (css file) css id of particular site’s area is located. comparing to what mercime wrote, as I understand, easiest solution for beginners is to rename style.css and make several renamed clones of it with incorrect info, what will make thief at least to think which code to use.
never use described method, this is just imagination 
I really wouldn’t advise playing any games for many reasons;consider, you won’t see any pros taking this sort of action!
