In the same manner that world history is a struggle between grasses and trees*, the internet is a struggle between producers and consumers of media for control of the way in which media is displayed on the user's screen.
The earliest versions of HTML were specifically designed so that the consumer had maximal control over how the information was presented. The exeption was <table>, which allowed the producer to order the information in rows (<tr>) and columns (<td>). But one of the cool things about <table> is that it allowed nesting. You could do a new table inside the cell of an existing table. Producers of content very quickly begain to use this nesting to control how the information displayed itself on the user's desktop.**
And then along came movable gifs, videos that start automatically, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Things seemed to shift decisively in favor of the producer's colonization of the laptop.
Weirdly, in the early phases of this just about every "Web Design for Dummies" type book warned content producers not to put movable gifs on their web-pages, because they are distracting and a non-trivial percentage of users hate them. But as the web commercialized, "distractability" became a feature, not a bug, and most commercial web pages are like seething mounds of cockroaches, little bits moving here and there all over the place.
For those of us who find cockroach infestations so distracting that it's not worth it to use a teeming website, adblock plus has been a blessing. But the battle continues with the freedom fighters at adblock constantly having to change things so as to stop new and terrible ways the forces of the dark side try to colonize our screens.
Distressingly, the Galactic Empire has in these last few months adopted another strategy. You go on the web page and then a useless drop-down menu comes down, taking up an inch or so of screen space at the top. The leader of this bit of interface barbarism has of course been Microsoft-owned slate dot com. You go to a story now and when you scroll down a drop-down menu comes down. It colonizes your screen space to no end at all, just showing the name of the article that you are reading (as if you might forget).
Unfortunately, last week's nytimes web re-do copied slate, though the drop down includes stuff you can navigate to. The new republic web site does the same thing, though their dropdown has places you can click to e-mail the article, print it, or put it on social media. In all cases (though slate is the worst), I find it distracting to have information stay still while everything else is scrolling. It's also information you don't need that is taking up screen space. This is quite frankly obnoxious.
Why are they doing this? Hypotheses:
- It feels good to be in control, even if you are messing over your own readers (so here we just have a passive-aggressive response to adblock plus),
- All of these companies have in house web designers and the have to be kept busy by constantly redesinging things, even if it makes it worse.
Any other reasons anyone can think of?
I hypothesize that only reason the dropdowns don't include adds yet is because the programmers at adblock would do something about it. I think very soon we'll find out if they can.
[Notes:
*Which grasses won by making themselves edible to creatures like us.
**It's interesting how natural it is to divorce "information" from the way in which that information is presented. I think that this is unproblematic in this context, but that a much bigger story has to be told with respect to all media, including with respect to human-computer interface issues.]
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