love to make my site unusable to people with screen readers just to defeat adblock

@monorail like, how does that defeat adblock in the first place

@monorail can't it just look at the rendered output instead of the raw html, or some intermediate pass of rendering?

@monorail also I just realized those letters are in basically no order whatsoever, how does that work

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@monorail even so why does that render as "sponsored" and not as "...jjknwjyywS..."

@Felthry css is used to make all the letters that aren’t supposed to be there invisible

@monorail we barely have any idea what css does but I know that asking would be a lot to ask

@Felthry it’s what makes web pages look nice instead of looking bare bones

it affects how things are laid out or what colours they are or what effects they have or what shape the corners are or whatever

i downloaded an extension to disable all the css on a web page and glaceon.social looks like this

@Felthry everything in the screenshot is on the page

css is used to separate it all out into columns, make the images a less ridiculous size, etc etc

@monorail why are the images a ridiculous size to begin with, though?

@Felthry they keep them at a ridiculous size so that they’ll look good at any reasonable size

if they kept them at regular emoji size, if you zoomed in they’d look like garbage

@monorail @Felthry ((tbh if browser defaults weren't what they are, CSS would not be as necessary. Mothra doesn't support CSS (and a lot of other stuff) but it renders pure HTML quite nicely. bare bones can look good.))

@monorail @Felthry Also it's supposed to let you set up a web page so, like, a picture of something appears to the right of a paragraph of text explaining what it is, or setting a line of text to be vertically aligned with something else on the screen, but nobody has ever figured out how.

@Austin_Dern @monorail I was thinking about how this is similar to the purpose of TeX and briefly had a thought of webpages written in LaTeX and uh. that's kind of a scary thought

@Austin_Dern @monorail then again, having access to TikZ and math mode on websites would be handy....

@Felthry @monorail Yeah, there's probably a timeline where web sites started from TeX and that would be ... uh ... I'm not sure it would be worse. It would make mathematics a lot less hard to do, though. I think there've been, like, forty attempts to do a standardized mathematics markup language and nobody's done any better than 'run latex2html and put up a lot of pictures'.

@Austin_Dern @monorail yeah but it's really hard to get TeX to put a picture in precisely the location you want, or at least we haven't found out how

@Felthry @monorail Oh yes, now, *that*'s absolutely impossible.

... WordPress has this sweet little inline LaTeX engine so if you need a simple equation you can write, like, $latex f:x\rightarrow x^2 $ and it renders that on the fly. And you can put in inline CSS to your site, so it's completely impossible to predict what it shows.

(Mathstodon.xyz has that LaTeX engine too.)

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