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The Atlantic has posted an interesting article on internet advertising calling it The Internet's Original Sin. Written by Ethan Zuckerman, who worked at Tripod during the birth of online ads, the article does a good job identifying the issues with relying on ads as the primary source of funding behind the internet. Ethan also speculates on some possible solutions to the problem—which mostly lean toward subscriptions as funding.
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Advertising: the Internet's Original Sin
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Make it right before you make it faster.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 19 2014, @04:23AM
Funny you should say that because I wrote code that strips out EVERYTHING I can't see when a webpage is rendered in a webbrowser window.
No scripts...no cascading style sheets...just content!
This excellent site:
https://www.medium.com/matter/ [medium.com]
'hides' their content IN the script(s) in the webpage. I've written code to extract the content out of the scripts.
Recently, I tried to load this page:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/28/molly-schuyler-steak-eating-record_n_5405554.html [huffingtonpost.com]
and sorta gave up--the scripts KILLED IE's responsiveness! :P
So I loaded the URL in my custom 'crap stripper' and after several seconds the content came up so I could read it.
That right there tells you we may be at/past the point of no return of internet advertising when there is SO MUCH crap unseen in a webpage that it takes a NOTICEABLE amount of time to get rid of it all before you can read it! (>_<);;;
I used to use the OFF BY ONE to load sites like this but it is a bit too old for the task and such sites either block it because its HTTPS support is too old or its User-Agent HTTP header doesn't identify it as an ad-friendly browsersaurus like IE/FIREFOX/OPERA or the site text comes up with lots of 'unreadable crap' due to content encoding problems handled correctly by IE/FIREFOX/OPERA or simply 'sabotaged' by the server at the webmaster's behest to feed bad HTML to OFF BY ONE to try to get you to use an ad-friendly browsersaurus like IE/FIERFOX/OPERA so they can have a better chance of getting their ad money. Most the times, sites come up in OFF BY ONE where you can read them and see pictures not imbeded in script tags that it ignores because it doesn't support scripting but the pages are formated like crap--I guess their is no CSS support either but that is OK, I can still read the content and see the pictures! :D