A look at modern news websites. How programmatic ad-tech, huge payloads and hostile architecture destroyed the reading experience.
  • vext01@feddit.ukEnglish
    151·
    2 hours ago

    Let’s go back to gopher?

    Read the guardian over the gopher protocol at my gopher hole:

    gopher://theunixzoo.co.uk/the-guardian

    • notabot@piefed.socialEnglish
      4·
      2 hours ago

      Thank you for this, it makes for a nicer reading experience than their own website! Is the code open source by any chance?

  • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    43·
    4 hours ago

    Unless the user is actively navigating, the header is dead weight. The header should hide on scrollDown and reveal on scrollUp. Let the content breathe.

    This one I actually hate. Often I just want to scroll up a few pixels, either to satisfy a mild compulsion or to align the content so I can see most of it. This is completely ruined if the navbar pops back in. Leave it at the top of the page, where it belongs, not at the top of the viewport!

    • new_world_odor@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      I feel your pain. The really good ones plan for this, some pop up immediately when you scroll up and that sucks. The proper thing to do (imo) is to wait for the user to scroll 80% of the viewport back up, only then letting it begin to slide in, and have it slide in at a rate 1/2 of the page scroll. I do like having it easily available, but it should feel like it’s trying to stay out of the way.

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      36 minutes ago

      I have this usercss:

      [data-testid="header"],
[data-mobile-fixed="1"],
[data-remove-fixed="0"] {
  position: absolute !important;
  width: 100%;
}
main { padding-top: 2rem !important; }

      Works well enough on most sites. And on those it doesn’t, you can easily exclude.

      Can likely be expanded, but adding just header broke more than it fixed.

    • village604@adultswim.fanEnglish
      10·
      3 hours ago

      It really depends on the site for me.

      What I really hate is a table that’s multiple scrolls long where the header row doesn’t follow.

  • stoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
    86·
    4 hours ago

    I have said it before, and I’ll say it again.

    An adblocker is part on my security suite on my computer.

    Ads can be hijacked to spread malware, and unless the site owner agrees to take both financial and legal liability for the possible dammage caused by their website I will never consider removing my adblocker.

    If they agreed to take on the responsibility, I still wouldn’t remove my adblocker, but I would consider it.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    35 minutes ago

    Funny enough, most JS-only sites (those who are empty with JS disabled) display fine on Dillo.

  • Em Adespoton@lemmy.caEnglish
    44·
    4 hours ago

    I have to admit, I hadn’t realized it had got this bad. How did this get normalized?

    I browse with most scripts disabled, and have since JS was first introduced to the browser. What I’ve observed is that some pages contain NO actual content, or just the first paragraph, when I load them. I read what’s provided and move on. If the site is hostile to me reading their content they worked so hard to get in front of me, I’m not going to do any extra work to find out what it is.

    • jtrek@startrek.websiteEnglish
      1·
      49 minutes ago

      How did this get normalized?

      The average user doesn’t know or understand technical details, and don’t believe they have any power to change anything

      Also capitalism means a small number of assholes make most of the decisions for reasons that benefit them

    • vinnymac@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      Ironically somehow AI is making disabling JS better nowadays, because text/markdown is becoming normalized, so receiving a pure text version of a page is a thing again.

    • Jack@slrpnk.netEnglish
      18·
      4 hours ago

      It is mostly because the bar is measured in time to display content (forgot the name of the metric)

      So the huge about of bullshit gets hidden by fast internet and asynchronous jobs.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    Btw, anyone has a example of a tracking canvas in html? Wouldn’t it falsify the results, if you resize it via a userstyle?