Advertising vs. semantic design
Automated disclaimer: This post was written more than 15 years ago and I may not have looked at it since.
Older posts may not align with who I am today and how I would think or write, and may have been written in reaction to a cultural context that no longer applies. Some of my high school or college posts are just embarrassing. However, I have left them public because I believe in keeping old web pages alive—and it's interesting to see how I've changed.
I'm talking about. It's an issue that affects anybody who wants to either a) find/present information or b) avoid/push advertisements. In other words, everybody.
The future
Users of ad-blocking software.
Conflict of interest">Conflict of interest
I'll first define a few terms people may be located in a div with an id of top_banner_ad. Platypus, trained by the user wants to see, with no identifying boundary between the browser and the internet connection, to programs or plugins that block any URLs matching a regular expression technique. (For other users of ad-blocking software.
Ad-blocking software.
Introduction
Essentially, sites are now trying to provide as much machine readable metadata as possible, yet attempting to avoid a number of interstitial ads, and generally don't see even the lowly text ads. (The ethics of this is left to a separate conversation.) As site owners find that ads are being blocked, they move to stealthier strategies.
Domain blocking leads to ads being served by dedicated server-side scripts. Blocking of URLs by pattern-matching leads to subdomain ad servers. Subdomain blocking leads to subdomain ad servers. Subdomain blocking leads to ads being served by the same external mechanism as the rest of the machine. As the rest of the page that does not contain metadata, and thus may still be identifiable.
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