The Ad-Man Made Your Browser Suck, from Disenchanted. Advertising is the sole reason your browser is still a throw-back of user-interface design. Find out why the ubiquitous, but failing sponsorship model of the Internet is keeping Mozilla's wings clipped.
The web browser is our chance to answer the question, What if one could download a TiVo?
We already have software like Webwasher and Internet Junkbuster (available for BeOS, no less), but what if Mozilla includes this itself? Just like Microsoft coupling IE and MSN Messenger to Windows, give everyone an ad-blocker built right into the browser.
(Speaking of Webwasher, I had it misconfigured to block text links it determined were ads. Those apparently include any links with the word "ad" in the href, including the one to the article I'm talking about. The lack of semantic cues means Webwasher must use unreliable methods to determine what I want blocked and what I don't.)
Mozilla already has a semi-functional ad blocker with the "Block Image From Loading" option in the image context menu, but the versions I used weren't smart enough to block from *.eviladvertiser.net, not just the particular 0x430km1.eviladvertiser.net from whence that one image hails. And of course Netscape 6 users are ineligible, since advertisers who know what's going on might not buy in AOLland.
But the article isn't talking only about ads: advances in the entire Semantic Web concept are stuck in chicken-egg-land, since the whole idea is more control for the user, an Internet less like television. That's what advertisers don't want: it's not the TV with a "buy" button they were promised (and so far neither are PVRs like TiVo), and it certainly won't encourage transition from user to consumer. Enabling software to understand what's what means advertising would be trivial to snip out of the experience,
and that just won't do.
XML and "the new HTML" are steps toward a certain amount of content-based web functionality. I use Radio UserLand to get headlines from a bunch of web sites through RSS and other syndication formats, all funnelled into one page, so I can decide what's important to see today from scores of sites without actually going to scores of sites; it's also the light content management software I use to write this weblog. I use Mozilla's user stylesheets to neuter the <font/> tag and one could suppress display of ad-sized images with them, but CSS is for divorcing semantic and visual markup: use <h2/> with style data instead of <font/> for a second-level heading, because it looks the same in supporting user-agents, and programs can understand it.
But I still can't do a simple thing I've mentioned before: right-click or use a special toolbar in Mozilla to, in addition to Back and Forward and Home, have Next and Previous and Up UI when available. As far as HTML is concerned, that's old hat; this page in my art gallery has this code:
<link rel="next" href="jailbird-back.html" />
<link rel="previous" href="lookity.html" />
<link rel="up" href="../index.html" />The <link/> tag is exactly what a web user-agent would use to provide next-previous-up navigation--and Mosaic does. But because "no" user-agents do that (who cares about anyone who uses Mosaic these days?
think developers), hardly any sites use it. Because hardly any sites use it, user-agents don't add support.
I see the value in providing semantic navigation cues, so I provide them. Advertisers and ad-beholden sites don't, because the Semantic Web is all about giving up control to the browser, which means giving it to the user. If advertising is The One True Business Model and users don't like ads, users don't want sites to be profitable. (Actually, of course, users just want different business models, but that means work or obsolescence for advertisers.)
XML and the Semantic Web are all about giving control to user-agents--about including computers in the Internet conversation--and us wily users and programmers will, given that ability, not allow ourselves to be controlled.
