The Adblock Project

[Guest]

Adblock is great. This should be integrated into Firebird 0.8 instead of as an extension. Anyways, onto my suggestion.

Adblock is perfect at blocking image-based advertisements. However, there should be a way to block recurring text in a web site based on the HTML.

Here is how I envision this:

You highlight the text that you want to block and the context menu will ask to block text. It then remembers the HTML that generates that selection and removes it from the page the next time.

There of course should be some sort of wildcard system implemented so if it sees something like this:

<table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0 width=305 align="left" style="padding-right:5px;">
<tr><td><img src="/images/300_sponsoredlinks.gif"></td></tr>
<tr><td style="padding-top:5px;">

<!-- some ad here // -->

</td></tr>
</table>

You could generically block a certain portion of code everytime it sees the text "Advertisement" in a table.

Obviously the problem with this situation is that if it sees one </td></tr></table> set of tags, it's going to terminate, perhaps prematurely.

I think that the only way this will work is if the algorithm has some accounting built in such that it remembers where it is in the hierarchy.

The utility of text blocking could extend to more than just blocking text ads. It could also include blocking extraneous stuff in a page on a regular basis. Think of it like the "Nuke Anything" extension for Firebird, only it remembers to "nuke" what you told it to for that page everytime the page renders.

Thanks for reading my thoughts.

Sincerely,

Paul Kucher

[lump1]

Oops, I just submitted my own post about text ads, because I've apparently overlooked yours until now. It would be quite challenging, but it seems that text ads are all that's left. I'm the code and interface for all the other blocking is so great that it won't take long before it's perfect... and what then? I say: enable some cannonical "block" list that's maintained by volunteers... and then, attack those text ads! (It would be cool if adblock gave you an option: expand your block list by from a webpage, and then ask for a URL of a voluinteer-maintained list. This would be useful now, but almost necessary if adblock decided to go after text ads.)

[rue]

You both have the right idea. Basically, you should be able to select any area in the page and tell Adblock "this is an ad." Adblock would update it's metadata-record and use it to refine the ruleset on-the-fly.
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Minimal-interaction. That's the goal.