A few years ago, when I was just discovering the wonders of browser extensions, I had an idea for a project where all online advertising would be replaced by a simple two-frame flashing GIF. It would simply be one pixel, switching between black and white, stretched to the size of the ad it replaced. Ads used a lot more screen real-estate back then, and the idea was to call attention to the subversiveness of advertising. The Adblock extension had an option to switch from blocking ads to simply hiding them (preserving the structure of the page better). I figured that it would be relatively easy to use the hide function to replace ads how I wanted, but since I had no coding experience back then, I simply shared the idea on Adblock forums and left it. Today, I was happy to find that somebody’s realized a similar idea. Based off of Adblock Plus, Add Art replaces online advertising with art, cycling through contemporary art every two weeks.
This idea’s already nearly complete, but I should right it down before I forget to finish it. Essentially, I want to isolate all the silence in the footage that my group shot in New Orleans. That means, taking out the talking, and simply having the pauses between sentences, with the subjects openning their mouths and cutting to them closing their mouths.
Working in one design, it does not take long to realize that nearly everything you do requires some sort of workaround for Internet Explorer. Pretty quickly, you simply start to lose enthusiasm for the people using IE.
Instead of constantly trying to create fixes, someone (me?) should create a library of fixes that automatically whips Internet Explorer into shape. If it saw some troublesome CSS, it would call up a fix. It would have to be open-source, simply because of how enthusiastic I can imagine people would be to improve it. Size can become an issue, but if managed properly and calling data only when necessary, it doesn’t have to be.
Of course, there’s those without javascript. This wouldn’t be a problem for search engines, screen-readers, or cellphones, because content would not be changed (and they don’t use IE). In regards to users who voluntarily turn off their javascript, I have two notes. First, a large portion of IE fixes require javascript anyway (i.e. PNG fixes and :hover fixes), so these users would still miss out on them. The second note reflects my opinion on the matter of progress. People using a shoddy browser don’t know better, but those who also have Javascript turned off have done so voluntarily. Anybody using a visual browser (i.e. one that supports CSS) should have javascript. A web developer should always give a few years for web technologies to settle before jumping in, but eventually they should move on. Javascript is an important standard that and blocking it means completely disabling the potential of the Internet, as well as further slowing growth of important standards in the future.
