Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Ilan Volow <listboy AT clarux.com>]

On Apr 15, 2004, at 10:18 AM, Phillip Rhodes wrote:

> Ilan Volow wrote:
>
>  > Never ending pop-ups and sites that kill your back button come to 
> mind.
>
> Interesting. I use Mozilla with it's built-in pop-up blocking, so 
> almost
> never have to deal with pop-ups, even with javascript enabled.  I do 
> find those "back button killer" sites to be extremely annoying as 
> well,
> but not enough so to turn off javascript.
>
> Do you find a lot of sites doing that? In my day to day surfing, it 
> seems that I really don't encounter those all that often anymore.
>
> TTYL,
>
> Phil

I don't usually surf the net javascript turned off all the time (though 
I can easily see how someone would feel like doing this). It's only 
when a site is being a real bastard that I'll turn it off. For me, have 
javascript preventing me from using an one important site (e.g. NCSU 
course registration, etc) is far worse than 10 sites that maliciously 
abuse javascript. Safari does allow me to block pop-ups, but NCSU seems 
to use them a lot for important stuff, so I usually leave pop-up 
blocking off.

One would think by now that the latest versions of browsers would have 
some sort of "site lock-in detection and avoidance" system (I'll call 
it SLIDA for short). The SLIDA system would keep track of the URL's you 
get by hitting your back button and it would compare the "back URL" 
with the URL you were previously at. If the two URLs end up being the 
same after the javascript or http header has been evaluated, then SLIDA 
would tell the browser to go back to the previous page and ignore the 
results of whatever javascript command or http header that tries to 
hijack your browser. And surely, some "arms race" wound start up 
between browser makers and marketing camps, just as with the spam 
filter and spammers camps.


--
Ilan Volow
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!