Is the Web Heading Toward Redirect Hell? 321
Ant snips from Royal Pingdom this excerpt: "Google is doing it. Facebook is doing it. Yahoo is doing it. Microsoft is doing it. And soon Twitter will be doing it. We're talking about the apparent need of every web service out there to add intermediate steps to sample what we click on before they send us on to our real destination. This has been going on for a long time and is slowly starting to build into something of a redirect hell on the Web. And it has a price."
Re:How do you get offenders to stop? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everyone has 1MB/s.
Any ideas on how to convince people to stop?
Surely it's the latency, not the bandwidth that is the problem with 301s?
They can't be much more than a few hundred bytes!
It's a shame too... (Score:5, Insightful)
Techie price greater than luser price (Score:5, Insightful)
I know that when I go to a site that can't work unless I allow a half dozen or more other sites to run scripts, I sometimes decide that it's not worth my time. When I click a link that then has to contact several domains, (sometimes ones I have specifically blocked) I might stop right there and close the tab.
The web isn't just headed towards redirect hell - it's turning into a damn sketchy web of tentacles working their way into every page. When I find ones that I'm not comfortable having around, I don't go back.
I'm not sure I like what the web has become. Thanks to NoScript, I at least know what it's become.
More ads, again... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sampling can be good (Score:2, Insightful)
advertising funds nothing serious (Score:4, Insightful)
and there is no useful (i.e. non-light-entertainment) content created primarily through advertising revenue. Slashdot developers who have made their money over the last decade producing tat by not overestimating the intelligence of the general public cannot bear to admit this, but you simply cannot produce high-calibre content when your primary aim is to suck in as many as possible of the kind of people who take notice of adverts.
Murdoch, often maligned for his lack of business sense but mysteriously still richer than all of us, seems to have tried and failed at pushing the subscription model. Obviously there are other viable models for producing information on the web such as government sponsorship (BBC, academia) and well organised groups of hobbyists (e.g. ham radio), but how will the sites who do not already have a dedicated subscription base through off-line heritage sustain themselves? Or maybe the answer is that they will not, the moment they take their eye off the advertiser as customer and start worrying directly about satisfying the desire for the reader to intellectually advance himself.
Re:How do you get offenders to stop? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's also the added DNS lookups to consider.
Re:The AJAX Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
your browser's SOP (same origin policy) prevents you from doing this. scripts aren't allowed to make net connections to sites outside the domain of the current page. this is to reduce XSS (cross-site scripting) attacks.
i understand there are standards in the making to allow such things, securely.
Re:Techie price greater than luser price (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry - I meant to say:
https://mail.google.com/a/schoolmaildomain.edu/ [google.com]
Re:How do you get offenders to stop? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds just as brilliant as the classical idea to preload all links from a page... Addons like this kill the Internet. They're worse than the problem they're trying to solve.
Re:How do you get offenders to stop? (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple. Same reason latency for packets varies, but in reverse. There's a huge volume of mail that moves from San Francisco to NYC, so they have air mail routes that optimize this. Because the distance from San Francisco to, for example, San Diego is relatively short and relatively low volume, they take it by truck, so it takes longer to get there, and probably stops in LA on the way (which is probably a latency disaster due to the amount of mail they process---going through LA can be like a corrupt BGP packet causing backbone traffic to be routed through your little home DSL router). With network traffic, it's the reverse; longer hauls are more likely to go to satellite, which spikes the latency way up. Shorter distances are more likely to be by cable, which has a lower latency. The point is that the haul mechanism determines the latency, and different links have different haul mechanisms depending on distance and expected load.
Re:How do you get offenders to stop? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't love them either, but this won't happen. For nearly everyone browsing the web, shortened urls aren't a problem. It's a process that has added utility for both parties and "just works".
Or put another way, when people stop liking Twitter AND knowing how many clicks they've gotten through urls... THEN it'll stop.