Let’s say you see a message on a web site which disturbs you some way or another, it annoys you, it offends you, you find it immoral, various other things.
You might think it’s a good idea to either take a picture of the screen (quite a non-technical solution), or just hit PrintScreen on a Windows PC and paste it in a Paint image/Microsoft Word document.
The thing is, it can be quite easy to change what you see on the screen, to manipulate the message.
If you’re using Chrome / FireFox / Safari / Edge (and I wonder what else would you use, if you’re in 98% of Internet users), you can read about document.designMode = ‘on’:
- How to Edit Any Web Page in Chrome (or Any Browser) »
- God Mode in browsers: document.designMode = “on” – DEV »
- How to make a page editable in the browser »
- Google Search »
As you can see, it’s so easy to change the text in a page, that even if you do take a screenshot, that may not count as a proof for “But that web site, on date X, said Y”.
A better solution is to use an external tool to save the contents of the page and put a time stamp on it.
I will only link to a Google search because this kind of tool needs to be used for a while, and online tools tend to disappear after a while, and I won’t edit this article very soon. So, a Google search »
One web site which might disappear someday »
What a web site like this is to visit the page for you and save it and put a time stamp. There are multiple solutions for this.
