I have a dream…
Ads - That’s how you make money on the Internet. And since everybody wants money ads are spilled all over the Internet. What if…
Semantics is the reason why HTML exists: there are elements to tag headlines, tables, lists and countless other types of text to give the text a structure. I know ad providers wouldn’t even consider this, since it would make their ads easily blockable by ad-blockers like Adblock Plus for Firefox, but seeing German sites are required by law to mark advertisements and make them stick out of the text flow why isn’t there an <ad> element (or at least one on the to-do-list for HTML5) to make that tag machine-readable?
The only way to make ad providers use such an element would probably to require it by law - and given the expertise the German government has recently shown in laws concerning information technology and the Internet years will be passing by without an <ad> element *sigh*