Javascript from the wonderful world of online advertising

8:23p.m., Wed 1 Sep 2010

I had a right old rant about the quality of javascript that you find being served by major providers of online advertising.

It's been the bane of my entire life as a developer. Often script includes dynamically include other files, often across different domains and nearly always uncompressed.

Another common occurrence is seeing the same ad, but in different sizes, take over an entire page - so you'll have a matching banner, MPU and leaderboard, but each creative will request the same 30Kb utility JS file, adding a cachebusting querystring to the src attribute each time. Just pointless http requests and a waste of both bandwidth and time.

It might seem like small things to get angry about, but it's a filure to apply even basic principles of good practice, and the little things keep piling up. Like using a single pixel JPG when no ad is to be served instead of a GIF file - thats a 3kb JPG instead of a 55 byte gif.

Grrr.

But every so often you find something so damn ridiculous that you have to laugh. And here's my favourite ridiculousity so far, courtesy of Atlas Solutions (who claim to offer 'industry leading tools')....

http://rmd.atdmt.com/tl/DocumentDotWrite.js

In case this link ever breaks I'll archive the entire contents of said file here for posterity:

function DocumentDotWrite(s){document.write(s);}

It's a lot of fun isn't it?