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Comment by swores | Hacker News Reader

I disagree completely, "blockers" is accurate.

The user chooses what website page to visit, but it's the website that chooses want content gets served at any of its URLs. That's how the web works. Hence, when websites choose to include aspects of the page users don't want: "blockers", to block some of the page. Nothing loaded about the term it's just descriptive.

Nor are they "content selectors/choosers", nobody uses their adblocking plugin to find content, only to block parts of content they've found by visiting a website.

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> "but it's the website that chooses want content gets served at any of its URLs."

No, not at all. The web was specifically designed so that the client chooses which parts of the available content to load, and in what way.

When I first started browsing the web I didn't have a graphical browser at home. My web client made decisions about which parts to display and which parts to not. It was not "blocking" anything, it was rendering the available content according to the capabilities of my system.

> "Nothing loaded about the term it's just descriptive."

It's a loaded term because it implies that websites ought to have control over display, when the web was specifically designed such that they should not.

> "Nor are they "content selectors/choosers", nobody uses their adblocking plugin to find content"

I modify many aspects of webpage display to help me assimilate content. When a website has chosen difficult to read colors, I change them so they're easier to see. I change fonts and font sizes. I modify page layouts, sometimes collapsing many separate pages into one long page, and sometimes I use screen readers and I don't even look at a visual rendering at all. I often remove annoying, obnoxious or intrusive content which also make it harder for me to read a page, many of which are ads.

The web is specifically designed from inception to give this agency to clients. Websites provide units of content and suggestions on how to best display it. That is all.

> No, not at all. The web was specifically designed so that the client chooses which parts of the available content to load, and in what way.

It was designed with this technical capability. But the social contract was always that you went to a site for it to tell you what to display. And we have many very nice, very non-standard sites because of it.

There is nothing wrong on blocking part of that content, but everybody's state of mind is that by default, any site content is expected to load.

>The web was specifically designed so that the client chooses which parts of the available content to load

Source that this is just a side effect from other design decisions?

>My web client made decisions about which parts to display and which parts to not

Your browser sucked because it couldn't even support the full standard.

>It's a loaded term because it implies that websites ought to have control over display

They should. Websites describe what should be shown using HTML and CSS.

> "Source that this is just a side effect from other design decisions?"

The source would be Tim Berners-Lee's original 1989 proposal for a hypertext information system. He specifically wrote: "We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities."

These sentiments are also reflected in other technical documents such as RFC 1866. The intent is crystal clear.

> "Your browser sucked because it couldn't even support the full standard."

I think this is a common reaction from people who aren't old enough to remember a world before mega-complex browser platforms and non-portable websites came into being. My browser absolutely was standards compliant at the time, and it was expected that websites would be viewable without graphics.

Keep in mind: javascript had not yet been invented.

Again, HTML is specifically designed around portability, generality, and flexibility. This has been degraded by the rush of commercialization and related platform lock-in -- in large part due to things web 2.0. This is not a good thing.

> "They should. Websites describe what should be shown using HTML and CSS. "

I think you should read a bit deeper into the underpinnings of these standards you're referencing.

>We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities.

This would support the opinion that entire web sites should be protable as opposed to just a small subset.

This is just not true. The host serves data to a client which can do what it wants with it.

The client can interpret the data from the website however it wants regardless of the intention of the website.

A website, for example, can use tags that a client doesn’t comply with.

The client is and always has been opinionated. It does not and never has had to obey the websites intentions.

While that's true of software set up to specifically subtract content from a server response, the code could just as well be set up to add page elements (e.g. for easier navigation) or just rearrange things. So "content customizer" or "user preference enforcer" would both be apt and less arguably pejorative.

"Blocker" implies a specific set of assumptions about a publisher having some say in how content gets presented. "UserAgent" entails a different worldview, one that the companies making browsers seem increasingly unwilling to defend against competing interests.

The websites are _requesting_ the users’ browsers to execute certain extra code the users deem unnecessary to their experience in using the site. The users have no moral responsibility to execute that code. If website owners want to detect and block users making such choices, that is their prerogative, but as long as they don’t, the users may continue to exercise the control and autonomy given by them by the website owners without any moral concerns.

> If website owners want to detect and block users

Oops. I guess you meant to say user request selector/filter then if the term "block" is so loaded.

I meant what I said.

The "end game" from the user's point of view would if someone indeed came up with "content selectors". It would be quite an achievement to build one that was actually useful.

Maybe easy version could work exactly the same way as blockers do, except they'd invert the way the rules are evaluted, and of course the rules would need to be custom as well. And then if the rules would fail to find some actual content on the page, then I guess you might not even know about it :).

The end game would be some AI running on a gpu in your monitor, so the browser nor the originating website need to know about any blocking.

Except you'd still have client-side execution in that case. Obviously not everyone cares, but there are some straightforward objective reasons to care if you're blocking it being rendered anyway, like why waste cycles on it.

True, but it's hard to block execution without the website not knowing about it.

That closely describes uMatrix in default deny mode. For each individual site and subdomain, the user gets to choose if they want to allow cookies, images, CSS, JS, XHR, frames. Too bad it's unmaintained, with most of its practical and commonly intended use cases fitting the simpler uBlock Origin.

But the underlying principle is still filtering out the undesired content instead of selecting the desired content.

Surely the principle the parent suggested was to initially filter out all of the content, and then selecting the desired content to load.

But isn't "filtering out all of the content" just another way of saying, "not loading any content" - until explicitly requested?

Perhaps I misunderstood. But let's say I do run uMatrix in deny more, I get the site HTML as the Tim Berners-Lee intended. Yet that already may contain some kind of advertising material, so to view only the actual content I'd need to have e.g. an XPath do it. So I would have a database of sites and XPath (or other ways) describing how to find the content, instead of describing how to get rid of non-content.

Can I tell uMatrix to only show a certain XPath from the page? If so, I agree it is a content selector, albeit pretty impractical :).

uMatrix is the absolute best, I can't imagine browsing without it. So the unmaintaned part is very sad and troubling.

I do install uBlock Origin for all non-technical family members, but uMatrix is so much more capable.

The end game for the web to be scraped into entries in a database to be displayed by real software instead of a web browser.

Sounds miserable and authoritarian

That's basically what the "reader mode" in the various browsers do

Anyone remember Proxomitron?

Blocking useless content makes finding useful content much more easier.

No one has enough time in the world to block all the infinite amount of useless content. We already do that perpetually by what we personally value the most and what we choose to ignore.

The website usually includes the address of the content to display or script to run. My post meant that I don't think we should take it as a given that our browser must fetch and run all of those resources automatically or else violate some protocol.

And if a user wants to have a policy of selectively choosing what content they want, but that content is hard to define or whitelist, then using a blacklist mechanism doesn't mean that the policy is to block. It's just the most common, practical method of choosing the content you want.

With CSS, at least, users being able to override styles was explicitly the goal of its first edition:

"One of the fundamental features of CSS is that style sheets cascade; authors can attach a preferred style sheet, while the reader may have a personal style sheet to adjust for human or technological handicaps."

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