element hiding: on what grounds is it necessary?

[guest]

hi
i ve been wondering why there's "element hiding", "specific hiding", and "specific element hiding" sections in adblock's subscription lists. couldn't maintainers of those lists just add those lines under blocking rules instead of hiding? is the reason why they do it becuz they want to allow some ad owners to make money by letting their ads being downloaded but not shown to user so in a way making them being counted as viewed?

[Ares2]

I think you got a wrong idea of how blocking and hiding rules work. Those things are absolutely not interchangeable, blocking rules allow you to stop the network requests to externally linked resources in a html page, usually things like scripts, images, flash objects, ... while hiding rules allow you to get rid of parts of the page itself, like text blocks, links, empty spaces reserved for ads in the layout, ... Filter subscriptions will usually try to block ads first and only use hiding rules to clean up after the blocking or to get rid of ads that cannot be removed with blocking rules.

Only hiding instead of blocking ads would be stupid anyway, it would waste bandwidth and CPU cycles and it would allow unnecessary 3rd party network requests.

And no, there is definitely no conspiracy going on, most of the filter subscription authors dislike ad providers just like or even more than you do.