Ad-blocking and the Regrettable URL Format

I use Adblock Plus to block advertisements and, more importantly, invisible privacy-breaking trackers (most people aren't even aware of these). I think ad-blocking is actually easier than ever, because ads are served from a relatively small number of domains, rather than from the websites themselves. Instead of patterns matching parts of a path, I can just block domains.

Adblock Plus emphasizes this by providing, by default, a pattern matching the server root. Example,

https://ads.example.com/*

But sometimes advertising websites are trickier, and their sub-domain is a fairly unique string,

https://ldp38fm.example.com/*

That pattern isn't very useful. I want something more like,

https://*.example.com/*

Unfortunately Adblock Plus doesn't provide this pattern automatically yet, so I have to do it manually. I think this pattern is less obvious because the URL format is actually broken. Notice have have two matching globs (*) rather than just one, even though I am simply blocking everything under a certain level.

Tim Berners-Lee regrets the format of the URL, and I agree with him. This is what URLs like https://ads.example.com/spy-tracker.js should look like,

https://com/example/ads/spy-tracker.js

It's a single coherent hierarchy with each level in order. This makes so much more sense! If I wanted to block example.com and all it's sub-domains, the pattern is much simpler and less error prone,

https://com/example/*

To anyone who ever reinvents the web: please get it right next time.

Update: There is significant further discussion in the comments.

• rant
• web