Comment by chongli
9 days ago
But today, the web is more of an application delivery system … I would prefer not to transact--at all--with any remote system that wanted to freeload on my resources
What I really want is a non-executable web. I first started using the web in the mid-90s and most websites were like that. HTML, images, colours, fonts (but only from a pre-defined short list), and the occasional sound. If a site used JavaScript at all, it was for trivial stuff such as rollovers (which can now be done using CSS only).
I’d like to go back to that situation, maybe not exclusively but as a separate option. Give me a non-executable web of text, hyperlinks, images, videos and sounds (but no auto-play), CSS, forms, and web components (that can be targeted by links and fetched without refreshing the entire page) so we can do really nice discussion forums, web mail, multimedia encyclopedias (think Encarta) and other server-rendered resources, all without client-side scripting.
It doesn’t even need to be a different protocol or anything like that. It would be enough to have an otherwise modern browser but with no JS engine and a search engine that only indexes pages that lack JavaScript so that they render and function correctly on that JS-free browser.
Naturally, the search engine would miss a lot of the spam sites out there because they all rely on JavaScript. It would also miss many legitimate sites that rely on JavaScript but that’s okay.
It would create a space for JavaScript-free sites to get attention and develop a community. It would of course allow commercial sites, but they’d have to rely on display advertising and traditional marketing (targeted audiences based on subject matter) rather than behavioural tracking. This was the kind of advertising used in magazines and newspapers. It was far less obnoxious but still quite effective when the audience was large enough. It also demanded a lot more creativity from the ad industry, as documented in the show Mad Men.
Unfortunately, there are already techniques that track you through static elements on a page (think tracking pixels, but any resource load is sufficient).
Considering the money in advertising on the internet, if web moved to more of a content delivery platform, we'd have both 1. content start including ads inline (you see that on Youtube already), and 2. static/server-side tracking techniques improve even further.
Even if we disallow cross-site resources, site owners will implement tracking server-side, though that obviously introduces a trust question between trackers and hosters.
With those two, an ad network with sufficient tracking support from web sites would still be able to cross-link the traffic on a single user and achieve similar results.
This does not mean we should not fight it. But this would just be a step in the cat-and-mouse game, but a very expensive and hardly achievable one too :)
Just put no cross-origin resources into my proposal. This eliminates ad networks entirely, including networked tracking pixels and networked ads (banners as well as text).
Yes, a site would still be able to host their own ads but advertisers wouldn’t be able to collect any analytics without implicitly trusting the host site. That really matters!
It means the advertisers need to enter a business relationship with the site directly. They can’t simply join a JavaScript ad-auction (the way nearly all ads work now). This makes them more akin to the sponsors we see now in videos. No tracking, just plain old fashioned audience targeting pertaining to the subject matter.
But why? Why wouldn't I want to enjoy stuff like this: https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/
Or watch a video. Or do some basic editing of some kind of medium that I will only do once and would make no sense to download a whole application for?
Why throw out the baby as well? Besides, ads can be part of text content as well.
This is typically something that should be regulated by laws, not through tech.
Please read carefully. All of your complaints were already addressed in my original comment.
I have zero faith in government’s ability to regulate these things correctly. Viz. cookie pop ups.