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So this means better user tracking capabilities are now native, even with Javascript disabled. You can learn what the user have read on the page before, and d

• manigandham 7y ago
  I'm an adtech veteran and I guarantee this kind of tracking is never used. Just because you have a signal available doesn't mean it's used or even useful for ads.
  • taeric 7y ago
    The cynic in me thinks if it was never used and that is useless, it wouldn't have been added as a feature. Because, I already feel that lazy loading should be rarely used and is itself mostly useless.
    • manigandham 7y ago
      Lazy loading is just another feature to improve performance, and browsers already used heuristics to load assets with prioritization by what would render first. Also in the last 5 years, every browser has added more functionality to block ads and tracking. Lazy loading is not going to somehow make up for that.
      • taeric 7y ago
        How does it improve performance? It is literally more work for the machine to (mis)manage. And most browsers already have viewport heuristics, no? What makes this more likely to succeed?
        • manigandham 7y ago
          By not loading images at all until you get to it instead of guessing if you will. It's already done by some websites using javascript. More work in milliseconds of CPU time is a worthwhile tradeoff for network bandwidth.
          • taeric 7y ago
            Guessing on if you have a fast enough connection to load is literally one of the features called out as hopefully possible with this spec. Such that it is expected that this flag will be controlled by scripts. (Or, turned to always eager if scripts are disabled...) My question is what makes this better than the current script solution? Especially knowing this is intended to be built up with scripts.
            • manigandham 7y ago
              I don't know. I was just commenting on how this is useless for adtech, but I don't see any negatives with giving developers more explicit controls over loading. Loading less data is a good thing regardless of internet connection speed.
              • taeric 7y ago
                My gut would be that this is going to win back speed lost to adtech. So, not useless. Just not useful to tracking. Which, quite frankly, is already extremely good. My gut would also be a lot of folks think this will be good for tracking sure usage. On both sides of the fence.
  • toast0 7y ago
    What advertiser doesn't want to know that their ad is visible?
    • catalogia 7y ago
      Rule of thumb: do not trust "adtech veterans" further than you can spit.
      • manigandham 7y ago
        A better rule of thumb is to avoid poor generalizations. I use my real name here so go ahead and look me up if you actually want to discuss something.
    • manigandham 7y ago
      That's called "viewability" and isn't related to relevance. It's already solved natively with the IntersectionObserver API which came out years ago and supports more than just an image. [1] Lazy loading is entirely different and offers nothing new or useful for ads. 1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Intersection_Observer_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Intersectio...
      • Kwantuum 7y ago
        As the first reply in this chain remarks: this is not available without Javascript.
        • manigandham 7y ago
          The point is that native lazy-loading is not useful for ad tracking. If there's JS then there are other methods to check viewability. If there's no JS then there are no ads at all.
  • IHLayman 7y ago
    Well, I'm a veteran software engineer, and one of my former jobs was to implement pixels and optimize page loading specifically for these kinds of pixels on an e-commerce website. It was a particularly hard problem because if you have dozens of pixels to order the loading of, it can really slow down the loading of a webpage or email. And I was one member of a rather large team. To say that pixel tracking isn't used in the industry is disingenuous at best.
    • manigandham 7y ago
      You either missed the context or misread the post. Pixel tracking refers to using any kind of beacons to send back data (originally images but now also JS tags) and there are many ways to optimize. This has nothing to do with lazy-loading image tags. This browser-native functionality doesn't add any kind of new tracking, and pixels are never lazy-loaded anyway because they need to be fired as soon as possible to ensure data capture. Nothing about this new API changes anything for ads.
• scarejunba 7y ago
  Hang on. Are you in the ad tech industry? I was, until recently, and this is far too granular a thing for people to care about. It's just too much tech for too little gain. I mean, I get what you mean: you place pixels strategically to see how far someone got on the page. But you can do that and more already (even full screen interaction) and no one uses that for ad targeting.
  • cosmotic 7y ago
    After the tracking gravy train dries up in the coming years, this might have been a possible point of exploitation. Seems the whole was covered anyway.
• jameslk 7y ago
  This has been addressed from reading the PR diff: > If scripting is disabled for img, return false. > This is an anti-tracking measure, because if a user agent supported lazy loading when scripting is disabled, it would still be possible for a site to track a user's approximate scroll position throughout a session, by strategically placing images in a page's markup such that a server can track how many images are requested and when.
  • floatingatoll 7y ago
    The subtext here is, I believe, that the on-page JS can already see your viewport if JS is enabled, and thus would have little reason to use images to duplicate that.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  > So this means better user tracking capabilities are now native, even with Javascript disabled. No, the change to the spec explicitly says lazy-loading is disabled if scripting is disabled just for this reason.
• kingludite 7y ago
  Sounds like you just had a viable adtech idea that no one is using because there is to much overhead. It takes a bit more to turn it into a sales pitch but I could see it work.
  • manigandham 7y ago
    There's nothing about that which is viable or new for adtech. Scroll depth has been an available metric for the last 5 years.