Can websites disable clipper function using page HTML?

[Belsevy 1]

I'm not a technical person so please forgive my ignorance, but is it possible for a website to pro-actively disable the clipper function?

I used to be able to clip pages from the InsiderIntelligence/eMarketer website (example https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/amazon-loses-steam-2022-expect-quick-recovery), but recently I've been getting an error message on this website and ONLY on this website saying "Clipper has encountered an error. Internal error occurred"

I can't make sense of the error log, this is what it says:

ERR: 17089298: Could not create note, error: o:{"errorCode":11,"parameter":"Error processing document: Invalid img src attribute:data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg version=\"1.0\" xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\"%0A width=\"470\" height=\"516\" viewBox=\"0 0 470 516\"%0A preserveAspectRatio=\"xMidYMid meet\"%3E%0A  %3Cg transform=\"translate(0.000000,470) scale(0.100000,-0.100000)\"%0A  fill=\"%23000000\" stroke=\"none\"%3E%0A  %3C/g%3E%0A%3C/svg%3E"}

Anyone have any idea what may be happening here?

[gazumped 11,666]

Hi.  I can clip content from that link without any problem.  I copied a paragraph - how much content did you try to copy?  There's also an option on that page to download the content as a PDF file.  Can you use that to attach the file to your note?

[Belsevy 1]

Thanks for your input @gazumped

I was trying to save the whole article. I tried 'Article', 'Simplified article' and 'Whole page' but none of them work, I also tried 3 different browsers (Safari, Chrome & Vivaldi). I can clip a paragraph or a screenshot, but that doesn't help me. I want the whole article and I want the content to be searchable in Evernote. Also I can't download the page as a PDF because it requires a paid membership which I don't have

[agsteele 2,950]

23 hours ago, Belsevy said:

I'm not a technical person so please forgive my ignorance, but is it possible for a website to pro-actively disable the clipper function?

The simple answer is yes but I doubt that anyone would be likely to target the Evernote web clipper. 

Some sites which require a login to view content effectively block access because the clipper had no means to provide a user/password. Since this is a part site it could be such an issue when you try to clip the whole page.

[PinkElephant 8,115]

From what I see the page is simply crooked, broken, whatever. You see it when simplifying - the page length explodes, the visible part of the page only comprising a few percent of the total page length. I think most is hidden behind the many little boxes below the main article. It is not possible to reduce or expand the clipping area, it is only the header, or the full page, nothing in between.

This means that the web clipper detects the main content of the page in the header area, not where the content in fact is posted.

The page contains a resource that is not compliant to the standards web clipper uses to interpret the website. This makes the web clipper break it off.

That some websites give trouble is nothing surprising, and nothing new. Among the millions of web designers living their ideas about how to set up a page, there will always be deviations. Furthermore it is a commercial site - so they probably have an incentive not to allow easy clipping from that website.

Remember the copy protection we had "in the good old days" on some games - like setting a pointer to an illegitimate file address: Only when this existed, the startup process was unlocked. Any copy made on a regular drive of course only contained legit file locations, so the copies failed. Sometimes you sabotage to protect content.

Pages that give problems can be reported to EN support. They will see if they can fix or work around the issue.

Just to check I downloaded the page with SiteSucker, 2 levels deep. It shows the website is pretty complex, loading nearly 200 objects and 81MB of data.

Data flow when calling the page showed some tracking activity (however surprisingly little). 

[gazumped 11,666]

2 hours ago, Belsevy said:

I was trying to save the whole article.

Did you try selecting all the text?  Sometimes clicking at the bottom and holding the mouse key down / dragging the cursor all the way to the top will allow Evernote to 'see' your selection and clip it successfully.  If all else fails,  there are third-party 'clip your website' services that might work,  although if PDF downloads are restricted,  then your suggestion that making copying difficult is by design might be true....

[PinkElephant 8,115]

When I select only text, it works (using the then showing "Selection" option). When other elements are included into the selection, it fails again.

[Belsevy 1]

18 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

When I select only text, it works (using the then showing "Selection" option). When other elements are included into the selection, it fails again.

Thanks for your input @PinkElephant

I agree that the page is a mess with a lot of other (useless) content which may be confusing for the clipper. It's clear from what you pointed out, and from my own experiments, there there is a specific, possibly non-visible, piece of content or code on the page that triggers the error message. The strange thing is that this happens on *ALL* pages of that website, so it must be an element that's common to every single page, which leads me to believe that this was done intentionally, hence my question.

Like I said, I'm not a technical person and my knowledge of HTML is limited, but what I find curious, when I look at the code on those pages, is that there are many references to Evernote in the HTML, like this one for example:

<script src="https://app-sj09.marketo.com/js/forms2/js/forms2.min.js" async="" defer="" data-evernote-id="1628" class="js-evernote-checked"></script>

I don't know what all those lines of code do, but this is why I was thinking they may be blocking the clipper with some sort of script.

Anyway, I appreciate everyone's feedback. Even though I don't think there is a solution to my issue at least I've established that I'm not the only one with this problem. Thank you