It doesn't matter if that person was good at his job (which btw from whatever his peers say about him, he most definitely was) - everybody deserves a right to at least be told that they are fired and no longer working at the job.
31 karma · joined December 8, 2010
Also, not all extensions run on every single site. Also, some extensions actually help in blocking malware, crypto-trackers etc so the potential upsides are also great.
Also, even if you take away advertising, the problem remains of addictive apps and 'persuasive' design which will still remain. To tackle that is a whole different discussion altogether.
No its not. Plus, if you combine Easylist with a bunch of additional filter lists, then it very easily crosses 50k.
Thats just false. Every adblocker using webrequest will be affected, including ABP.
Thats a bold assumption. If I have a business then I will advertise my product in the hope that people will see it and make a decision by themselves on if they need or want it, and make an informed choice to buy it.
Besides, its not about needs, but also about wants. Humans are driven by not just strict needs, but also aspirational desires, ambitions and tastes. For e.g, nowdays you don't really need a wrist watch anymore since you can tell the time from your mobile phone which most people already have, still the demand for such watches is there because it seems to fulfill some other desire that there is no longer any strict 'need' for. There are various ways you can make such watches (different price points, aesthetics, quality of materials, after sales service etc) which also appeals to different sets of humans. Ads help in getting the word out on your brand of your wrist watch in the hopes that some people out there will find it appealing enough to buy it.
Who decides whats useful for not? Pretty much every company making anything thinks they are useful and they want to tell people how or why in order for people to buy them. They would need some way to tell that at scale, and ads are a way to do it.
Thats not entirely fair. The WHATWG is also pay-to-play in a way - the browser makers have disproportionally higher power, even more so than the w3c model where there is at least some form of consensus forming among a group of people with more international representation. Now technically anyone in the world can open a github issue (w3c also does it though now), but thats about what anyone can do to oppose something in the spec that the browser makers have their hearts set on.
Still seems a pretty small group to control something so important, but I hope they keep improving and adding more people there from other companies and countries.
Yes, but (and you can disagree with me here) the W3C has much better international participation and say in standards. I know you can just file github comments, but none of the world has any real way to oppose any development that the whatwg makers have proposed. There doesn't seem to be any consensus forming or way to really oppose any development apart from filing a github issue. All the editors are pretty much from one company, which feels like handing over control of the web to that one company essentially.
You have more of a voice in the W3C than any other standards body (you can comment on the github issues, or join as an invited expert etc). The W3C was created by Tim Berners-Lee, if anyone should have a vote on how web standards are run, then the creator of the web should be one of the contenders for it.
>And the W3C had stalled progress so much in the 00s and 10s
Not the 10s, just the early part of 00s, due to the xhtml vs html5 thing.
Not really, it was, and still is, a neutral ground for people to discuss and build consensus on what technical standards should be on the web. CSS, ARIA, WCAG and many other stuff are working in the W3C pretty well.
However, it is indeed sad that the HTML spec is now controlled by browser makers only, and the editors are mostly from just one company.
Thats literally what ABP has. Ads which have meet the acceptable ads criteria appear by default, and the rest are blocked by default. Users can however go and disable that setting so that all ads are hidden by default.
Is it a chore though in ABP? It's front and center in the settings.
I am willing to deal with ads which don't do that in exchange for consuming more content and supporting the sites I visit often. Which is why I actually am ok with the acceptable ads setting, which allows me do block most ads except the annoying ones without any major tinkering or extra effort on my part.
It won't work if only one browser maker will participate. If only microsoft participated and implementing things in the CSS WG then nothing really would get done over there too.
If all the browser makers would have editors in the w3c html spec (like they do in many other w3c specs) and agree to implement stuff there, then that would also work.
From my experience, it has generally done a better job of explaining things developers would want to know, especially in terms of accessibility and internationalisation.
The XHTML stuff was a long time back, and at that time, it warranted having a whatwg. Now that W3C is no longer insisting on XHTML (and hasn't for many years).
>When it was clear that the WHATWG standard was the one that actually mattered because it was what was actually implemented, the W3C invited them back in to start working on the standard together. That's what HTML5 was; the W3C agreed that they would start from the WHATWG standard, that they could have the same editor (Ian Hickson), and they wound down the XHTML 2.0 group.
This is the crux of it. The WHATWG is really usefull for browser vendors because they can do essentially whatever they want in it without anyone having the power to formally object to it (unlike the W3C). Now the whatwg editors (and thus browser makers) can say that they will listen to community feedback, but thats pretty much a benign dictatorship over the most important spec of the web.
Thats actually nice to know, but specifically about HTML (which is one of the most important specs the whatwg works on) it's all browser makers. (That too, majority of them from one particular browser maker).
>I think this is probably the right way to go, instead of "The Director" having the final voice.
I think having a better mix of people in the decision making process than just browser makers would be the right way to go. I understand that browser makers have to implement the specs, but the web community as a whole has to use the specs to build the web of the future - and as such, people from non-browser companies should have a greater say in the final voice.
The W3C is also doing work in HTML at least too. If browser makers would actually participate as editors (like they do in CSS) then it would work just as well as the CSS working groups and others.
To me, this is giving browser makers even more power over HTML than they have otherwise.