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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

> IMO Javascript should not be allowed in ads at all.

I agree fully. I think part of the issue is that the folks submitting ads want to collect a lot of data. They probably don't use that data (or if they do, not well), nor do I trust them to not collect very invasive and unsafe data, but I suspect for many folks that having their own JS payload makes or breaks a possible ad network.

Given concerns about Monero mining, redirects, and other hijinks, removing JS from ads is even more critical now. I think the compromise will be to give ads some kind of network provided hook to get data back to "home" eventually, though then the issues above only shift from the ad provider to the ad network provider.

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Or at the very least, provide a domain-specific-language that "compiles" to JS that can do very limited things like animations and others.

That combined with requiring all of the assets to be hosted on the ad-network's servers would greatly improve the experience. (mainly because ad-networks are larger companies that the host website has a direct relationship with, so when users complain the site can talk to the ad-network, and the ad network can instantly do something about it)

Sadly, they have no incentive to do that, as those ads would be more expensive to create, most likely make less money, and most users that block ads block all of them regardless of how invasive they are. Adblockers treat all ads the same, and so now advertisers are faced with the choices of:

1. make more shitty invasive ads

2. make "better" ads (better for the user) and make less money while spending more and having users still block them anyway.

This is why I really believe that the "better ads" thing from google and others is a really good idea, because it helps re-align the incentives back with the user in some ways. If that works, shitty ads will be blocked much more widely, while good ads will get more views and more users.

I believe the term you are looking for is "transpiler".

No, it's a full compiler that would compile a DSL into JavaScript. Just because it's "to JavaScript" doesn't mean it's a transpiler.

> DSL to Javascript

That is a perfect example of the definition of transpiler!

I've never heard the term "transpiler" used to refer to anything DSL specific.

I've only ever heard it used for source-to-source compilers for JavaScript dialects.

Any source code to source code translation is considered transpilation until targeting byte code or other form of representation that is byte code, VM, or CPU specific. The terms do become blurred sometimes.

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