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#336 AdBlock blocks 'msad' ID
closed-accepted
1(low)
2013-11-13
2012-01-11
No
As various people on TEI-L noted the AdBlock browser extension blocks 'msad' in
http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/MS.html#msad
Options:
a) Rename this section's IDs and anything that points to these sections
b) Complain to AdBlock
c) Do nothing.
-James
My AdBlock filter is EasyList, so I've just registered for their forums
and I'm going to report the false positive to them. The forums are here:
http://forums.lanik.us/
but I haven't got the account activation email yet. I think this is a good interim solution, but we may want to consider Sebastian's tei_ prefix on all ids.
I think Sebastian's solution -- of prefixing the GENERATED HTML -- with a consistent prefix such as "tei_" or maybe "teiP5_" is the best way to go, pending a complete revision of the xml:id values in the source. The latter solution would be a lot more work. The proposed solution will of course break all existing links to the HTML version out there in the wild, but I expect people are getting used to that happening.
False positive report now done on the EasyList forums:
http://forums.lanik.us/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=9250
False-positive report also submitted to Fanboy list:
http://code.google.com/p/fanboy-adblock-list/issues/detail?id=15
EasyList now updated to eliminate the false positive:
http://forums.lanik.us/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=9250
I can confirm the update fixes the problem. The maintainer reports that it could take up to a week for the update to get out to all users.
Although I've argued against breaking existing links in the past I would like to vote for Lou's suggestion of prefixing Guidelines generated HTML IDs with tei_ (or similar). I think this should be done at the next schema-changing release of the TEI Guidelines.
In preparation for the telco on Feb 28, I've taken a look through a sampling of about ten of the filters listed here:
http://adblockplus.org/en/subscriptions
None of them have the specific element id "msad", although the server "msads.net" crops up frequently. It may be the case at this point that only Fanboy's list has the problem, but the maintainer is completely unresponsive. It would be impractical to check all the lists on the page manually, although it could be automated.
Council telco on 2012-02-28 agreed that we should add a prefix to all existing xml:id values in the Guidelines at the next release, so this is now Green.
There's a slight misunderstanding on this ticket. The Council telco minutes say:
"MH's previously circulated report discusses the blacklisting of URLs derived from some TEI identifiers such as #MSAD. After reflection, Council agreed with his recommendation that all existing identifers should be given a unique prefix such as "TEI_" ; it was also agreed that this could be done at the next available release. since it would not involve any schema change. SR and MH to confer on implementation before next P5 release. "
When SR and MH conferred, the agreed solution was to add the prefix in processing during the creation of the web guidelines; the assumption was that everyone wanted to keep the same ids (which are nice and short) throughout the source, and only change them when rendering the guidelines for the web, because it's only in the HTML output that this particular issue occurs; no reason presumably to burden the ePub output (for instance) with hundreds of longer ids.
It proved quite difficult (for me, anyway) to make this work. The only way I could do it reliably and simply was to pre-process p5.xml to add the prefixes in various locations (@xml:id, @target, @corresp), and this results in changes to the filenames of the chapters in output; the filenames are somewhat tangled up with ids.
Changing long-established filenames would result in broken links on the website, so that solution probably isn't acceptable. Another alternative would be to post-process the HTML pages, but that would add significantly to the build time.
Meanwhile, the comment below by LB, and one by JC on the Council list, suggest that others understood this to mean that the ids would be permanently changed in the P5 source. This is presumably relatively easy to do (although I suspect there would still be some interaction between the chapter ids and their filenames). At the same time, the problem which gave rise to this ticket has not resurfaced; the one remaining AdBlock list which did not respond to our request for a change (Fanboy) now seems to be moribund as of August 2012. So I'm going to set this ticket to Pending; if the problem ever re-emerges, we'll have a record of what was discussed and tried. If it never comes back in a year or so, we should just close the ticket.
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