"Bryan Hogan"  wrote

| What's with all those sites where every image is actually a chunk of
| javascript that goes off and fetches the image? What's wrong with a simple
| img tag?!?

  Yes. That's usually lazy load code, to prevent images loading
unless you scroll down that far. But then they don't use a valid
SRC attribute, so without script it's broken. But I suppose it
makes sense. Most visitors now are on a phone and have no
intention of paying attention long enough to actually read a
webpage, so why send them images they'll never see?

  Today I wanted to read an article at the NYT. I clicked. The
page was there but no article. I disabled CSS. Still no article.
I looked at the source. There was a vast pile of script that seemed
to be calling for something like an array of text strings to assemble
the article plus ads via script. Weird stuff. Line after line of
base-64 links. When decoded it became something like
nyt://article/[GUID here]

   Each line had the same GUID, but a numeric parameter differed.
Apparently that was some kind of syntax the script recognized as
parts available in some kind of server-side database. They had taken
numerous steps to obfuscate the actual webpage content, presumably
so that no one would see it if they didn't submit to script-based
spying and ad display.
  That usage of script has become common. It's used to break
pages, put transparent DIVs on top of links to break those...
all sorts of devious stuff to ensure that the only people who
ever see the webpage are those people who can't see anything
but all the ads jumping around. It's as close as they can currently
get to broadcast. They can only give you the files you ask for,
but they can design it so that the overall result is a downloaded
javascript software program that forces you to let them actively
control an animated process -- or see nothing at all. In a way it's
as though the page has been adapted to replace the Flash executable.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05