Re: The ability to turn off animations in browsers

Hidvégi Gábor wrote:
> Hey, I have just found a pdf about advertisements energy consumption - 
> made by a dutch university -, which is not 100% relevant, but you can 
> get the picture:
> http://eprints.eemcs.utwente.nl/18066/01/Hidden-Energy-Costs.pdf
> 

The problem with this proposal is that very few end user will go to the 
trouble of using this feature, or even be aware of it.  That's already a 
problem with accessibility and security features.  As the advertisers 
fund the web industry, there will be strong pressures to not enable it 
by default.

If there is some take up, there will be pressure on site designers to 
design sites in such a way that the editorial is not really usable with 
the feature enabled; that is something that, for example, makes elective 
decisions to block scripting, for security reasons, unworkable in practice.

Don't get me wrong, I do think it would be a desirable feature, but, if 
implemented, it is likely to end up on an advanced options tab, where 
only <1% of users enable it, and its usability will erode with time.

You might want to note that, quite a few years ago, the main focus of 
HTML discussion moved to a much more commercial wants oriented, non-W3C, 
mailing list, where support for animation was one of the main wants. 
The www-html list probably has a disproportionate number of people who 
still believe in the concepts like the semantic web, and the original 
divergence in the design philosophy of HTML from the state of computer 
mediated advertising at the time.

-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.

Received on Tuesday, 11 June 2013 07:06:58 UTC