nullprogram.com/blog/2009/08/02/
I use Adblock Plus to block
advertisements and, more importantly, invisible privacy-breaking
trackers (most people aren't even aware of these). I think ad-blocking
is actually easier than ever, because ads are served from a relatively
small number of domains, rather than from the websites
themselves. Instead of patterns matching parts of a path, I can just
block domains.
Adblock Plus emphasizes this by providing, by default, a pattern
matching the server root. Example,
http://ads.example.com/*
But sometimes advertising websites are trickier, and their sub-domain
is a fairly unique string,
http://ldp38fm.example.com/*
That pattern isn't very useful. I want something more like,
http://*.example.com/*
Unfortunately Adblock Plus doesn't provide this pattern automatically
yet, so I have to do it manually. I think this pattern is less obvious
because the URL format is actually broken. Notice have have two
matching globs (*) rather than just one, even though I am simply
blocking everything under a certain level.
Tim Berners-Lee
regrets the format of the URL, and I agree with him. This is what
URLs like http://ads.example.com/spy-tracker.js
should look like,
http://com/example/ads/spy-tracker.js
It's a single coherent hierarchy with each level in order. This makes
so much more sense! If I wanted to block example.com and all it's
sub-domains, the pattern is much simpler and less error prone,
http://com/example/*
To anyone who ever reinvents the web: please get it right next time.
Update: There is significant further discussion in the comments.