It’s been about a week since irritation with various JavaScript-based advertising systems drove me to install the NoScript addon for Firefox. The nice thing about it is that you can whitelist any Web site temporarily or permanently, so it’s really easy to decide which sites to allow to use JavaScript. It has rapidly made me much more conscious of some bad Web development practices, and of just how much third party JavaScript you find on Web pages.

First things first: if you want to get rid of ads, blocking JavaScript and Flash is a great way to start. Some Web sites that I found almost completely unusable are transformed into lightweight, fast loading wonders. (College Football News, I’m looking at you.) These days, just about any Web site that’s been built to generate revenue by way of advertising is colonized with at least four or five kinds of obnoxious ad schemes. This is especially true of sites at the margins where every dollar counts. Using ad filtering makes me feel bad because I’m probably denying them some revenue, but the multi-pronged ad assault is too much to take any more. Having NoScript installed is a huge win for these kinds of sites.

NoScript ships with a whitelist of domains that use JavaScript and that you probably want to leave turned on, like google.com and yahoo.com. There are plenty of other domains that I’ve whitelisted as well. JavaScript is indispensable for some kinds of applications, and NoScript makes it easy to give sites permission to enable it. I’ve also noticed that many Web pages embed Flash movies in such a way that you have to turn on JavaScript in order to be able to view the movies. With NoScript, I find this to generally be a blessing, since if the Flash is incidental to the Web page, I can just use the site as though it’s not even there. If I need to view it, I can just enable JavaScript.

Finally there are those sites that don’t need JavaScript, but use it anyway. I have been shocked at the number of javascript: URLs I’ve seen, and not to launch DHTML effects, but just as regular links or to submit forms. Such URLs are great for Bookmarklets but using them on Web pages is an outdated practice. These days the state of the art is to not even assign event handlers in your HTML but rather to associate JavaScript functions with elements on your page inside your JavaScript code. (See Unobtrusive JavaScript for more.) Lots of sites still use the older practices, though. Last night I bought something from an online store with a checkout button that pointed to a javascript: URL. What are they thinking?

One thing’s for sure. If you are avoiding JavaScript entirely because you’re worried about people who have JavaScript turned off, you can stop. These days, the Web is a tough place to be if you don’t have the capability to enable JavaScript on many Web sites.

Love Bourdain. Watch more Food Network than I’d care to admit (seems he suffers from the same condition). Agree with 95% of what he writes in this review.

Here’s how he rationalizes the claim that DRM is necessary and the fact that a huge majority of music is sold without it:

The notion that music does not deserve the same protections as software, television, films, video games, or other intellectual property, simply because there is an unprotected legacy product available in the physical world is completely without logic or merit.

Your exercise may be more effective if you believe it is effective. The mind is a powerful and mysterious thing.

I was all excited to try out Yahoo Pipes, which Tim O’Reilly calls “a milestone in the history of the internet” (not bad for zero day software), but of course it was down.

Judging from the screenshots I’ve seen, the concept is similar to smart playlists for iTunes. It allows you to filter the content from individual feeds based on a set of feed properties, and then combine those feeds in interesting ways. For example, now you can screen out posts from all of the authors you dislike on group blogs.

One interesting aspect of Pipes for site creators is that if it takes off, they can look at how users are taking advantage of their feeds, and then apply that knowledge to making their sites better for everyone.

Read Jeremy Zawodny for an overview and a bunch of outbound links to other comments about Pipes.

What does cost in terms of resources to bottle one liter of Fiji water and get it to consumers in the United States? Pablo Päster digs in and finds the answer to be 6.74 kilograms of water and 0.25 kilograms of greenhouse gases. Enjoy!

If Steve Jobs is really serious about wanting to get rid of DRM and not just hoping to sway European regulators to blame someone other than Apple for the vertical integration of music downloads, he should take Larry Lessig’s suggestion:

But then here’s a simple next step: There are artists on iTunes whose creative work is Creative Commons licensed. Colin Mutchler is one. When his stuff first went into iTunes, he requested the DRM be turned off. The request was refused. But if no-DRM is Apple’s preferred policy, then let them begin here.

Ed Felten’s response to the Jobs letter is also interesting. I agree that Jobs is framing the debate. Jobs knows the record labels aren’t ready to drop DRM entirely, and he wants to convince people that as long as the record labels won’t give in, Apple has no intention of licensing their FairPlay DRM to anybody. I don’t object to that framing too much, in that I have no interest in “open” DRM. I don’t buy DRM-protected music.

Update: Jon Gruber’s analysis is worth a look.

IntelliJ (makers of the Java IDE everyone loves) have released a Ruby on Rails plugin for IDEA. TextMate is a great editor, but there is lots of room for growth in the Ruby on Rails tools market. I’d love to be able to run my Rails applications in a visual debugger, and better profiling tools would be nice as well. I’d also also love to edit my Ruby on Rails code in an editor with real refactoring support as well.

Rogers Cadenhead prevailed in his domain name dispute with entertainment giant MGM. MGM attempted to wrest control of wargames.com from him, but the arbitration panel ruled in his favor.

Apple has posted an open letter from Steve Jobs explaining why the iTunes Music Store DRM works the way it does, and encouraging people to complain about the music industry requirement for DRM rather than Apple’s implementation of it. The whole thing is interesting, but here are a few snippets.

On lock-in:

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.

The rationale for not licensing FairPlay to other online music stores or makers of other audio players:

Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies. Perhaps this same conclusion contributed to Microsoft’s recent decision to switch their emphasis from an “open” model of licensing their DRM to others to a “closed” model of offering a proprietary music store, proprietary jukebox software and proprietary players.

On why music companies should get rid of DRM entirely:

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

I can’t wait to see the fallout from this letter.