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The Presentation-Layer Arms Race?
Oh dear. It seems that a new sort or arms race may break out shortly. The nice people at Arc90 Labs work hard to improve the user experience on the internet and one of their targets is the online-ad. One line ads are often badly implemented and more often than not end up annoying the very people they're supposedly trying to entice. Its also a sad reality that they also tend to drive the design of the page as you have to consider where to put that Big Ad or Banner Ad position when you're re-working layout... *sigh*
So back to Arc90 Labs... what did they do...? they created a simple and wonderful way to remove that clutter. Fantastic. I love it. Its called Readability.
But... I have a problem with this. Two problems in fact. The first is I wouldn't want anyone to change the layout of a page on my site without a little bit of discussion. I've worked hard to create a page they way it is, why can't you respect that. Of course thats kinda impractical so thats more a pet peeve. I'm a big fan of GM scripts that make minor tweaks here and there, like extra buttons in Gmail, or a new theme etc. However Arc90 Labs kicks off a radical, unrecognizable change to the page to achieve its aim.
The second problem is that right now this ad revenue, as much as you hate it, is what keeps many sites afloat. Most sites hate to be dependent upon ad revenue as their bread and butter (some aren't) but its a reality they face - and you do too by proxy. Ads are necessary at this moment in time to keep the content there.
All is well as long as the vast majority of users do the normal site navigation and the minority use these new toys. However I feel its a matter of time before tweaker and publisher get locked in a small arms race over enabling and disabling some site modifications just like this.
In this case, if a blogger or site owner wanted stop Arc90 Labs from working they could embed this code in their web pages (or in a referenced JS file thats on each page):
setInterval(function() {
if (document.styleSheets) {
var d = document.domain.split(/\./);
var base = (d.length > 1) ? (d[d.length-2] + "." + d[d.length-1]) : document.domain;
for (var i=0; i<document.styleSheets.length; i++) {
try { if (document.styleSheets[i].href.indexOf(base)==-1) { location.reload(true) } }catch(err){}
}
}
}, 5000);
The script is simple and was done in a rush (hence the try{})... you can also view it here.
It checks every 5 seconds for any external stylesheets that are on the page that do not originate from the base domain. If a non-base domain stylesheet is found then it reloads the page so as to restore the original.
Its simple (but not fully tested) and I'm sure Arc can find away around it, at which point I (or someone else) will update this and the back and forth will go on and on and on... I'd rather not have to do that.
Comments (8)
Hopefully, they won't turn this into a FF extension. I haven't heard of any workarounds to prevent FF extensions from altering the page.
Posted by Tim | March 3, 2009 6:04 PM
Posted on March 3, 2009 18:04
I think this is, at best, misguided. It will probably break your sties for users of assistive devices, for one.
If you don't want people to be able to view your text in the way they choose, just don't put it on the internet.
Posted by Phil Nelson | March 3, 2009 7:14 PM
Posted on March 3, 2009 19:14
I agree - this script isn't that well written and would impact some users. In addition it would be ineffective against a browser plugin. It should be viewed as an exercise.
I'm enjoying Readability very much but feel this is the first volley in a new conflict.
Posted by michael | March 3, 2009 8:03 PM
Posted on March 3, 2009 20:03
It seems like a completely pointless "arms race" to me. What about RSS readers? What if I simply run an older browser, or have a custom stylesheet, or disable styles or Javascript completely? Are you going to try and force me to view the page the way you designed it?
Posted by Justin Koh | March 3, 2009 10:54 PM
Posted on March 3, 2009 22:54
If I were them, my comeback would be to insert the new "readability" style rules directly into your stylesheet objects.
However, I'm not sure why you're so determined to get people to view your site in the way you want. You lost that battle years ago with adblocking extensions, user style sheets, Blackberry and Opera Mini-type browsers that do server-side transcoding, etc
Posted by dean | March 4, 2009 1:37 AM
Posted on March 4, 2009 01:37
But. The idea of HTML isn't to prescribe the presentation of a page, but it's to describe the presentation of a page. There's a subtle difference.
The way my user-agent decides to render the layout of the page is entirely up to me. I can use a user-agent style sheet, I can force the colours and the fonts and the size to be exactly the way I want it to be. It's up to me how I read your page, and a script like this just smacks as being .. well mean.
As Phil said, if you wanted to control your layout that much then HTML isn't the solution. Trust me, I've spent a decade battling with every iteration of Internet Explorer to try and reflect even the semblance of consistency.
If you're a publisher and you are that worried that something is going to alter the layout of a page, you should be first asking why people would use Readability, and resolving your own readability issues before stopping someone from fixing it themselves.
imho :)
Posted by Oli Young | March 5, 2009 5:48 PM
Posted on March 5, 2009 17:48
@Dean
I agree with what you, and most people have to say - and to re-iterate - I am a fan of Readability and now use it frequently.
But to take you up on one point: "If you're a publisher and you are that worried that something is going to alter the layout of a page, you should be first asking why people would use Readability..."
I think the publisher's concern isn't from a 'how can we address layout issues', its more like 'no one can see the ads which we depend upon'.
Maybe its me, but when you use a general browser (IE, FF, Safari, Opera) there's an expectation that you're using the site 'as it is' IMHO (as opposed to RSS Reader, Flock, and other tools).
Posted by michael | March 5, 2009 9:25 PM
Posted on March 5, 2009 21:25
hm. informative.
Posted by Affenenah | April 12, 2009 12:47 AM
Posted on April 12, 2009 00:47