He's also been legally targeted by those who want to silence critical coverage of their behaviour before, and received an EFF Pioneer Award in 2017 for his journalistic work (though he joked at the time "The sort of obvious interpretation to me is that this is an award for getting sued"). I don't know whether his acceptance speech is online somewhere but I remember it being a vivid description of the pressure legal threats have on people and businesses, even when they are ultimately dismissed.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/celebrating-2017-pione...
https://www.techdirt.com/2005/01/05/since-when-is-it-illegal...
But seriously, what's the thought process for a website to do this? Even embedded tweets are not pre-rendered images. Some one in some meeting decided that using a rasterized image would be awesomesauce. What kind of sick people were involved?
This whole thread is wildly off topic to the article but I really wish developers would think more thoroughly before rejecting standards and rolling their own.
It matters if you’re using a screen reader or browsing without downloading images due to limited bandwidth. Images also don’t resize text or change contrast to match my browser settings.
If all you do is read things on a microscopic mobile screen, maybe the sizing didn't scale a raster image beyond it's native size. For those of us boomers that read things on screens with plenty of screen space, things get scaled with that fancy mobile first responsive layout so that images are scaled larger than their normal size.
So as soon as you're willing to accept that not everyone views the web like you, we can all have a better experience. That's not just for the web page's designer, but for other readers on forums making comments about things they don't know about.
I see, download the HTML as provided by the server at the time. Then provide that separately and include the relevant text in the article. Yeah, that would be a better method.
Obviously a journalist isn’t law enforcement but a good one will still gather and retain evidence. They also don’t necessarily need to be as strict as prosecutors but it’s a good standard to try to emulate. To that end, a PDF wouldn’t do.
I wouldn’t doubt that these assumptions are overly generous to the reality of their evidence-gathering; it’s a bit idealistic and the implementation is lacking, at best. But if that’s their point behind the screenshot instead of inline text, I still think they’re coming from the right place. They mostly just have a bad implementation.
But at the same time, I get where you’re coming from, even assuming more responsible intentions. A bit more applied critical thinking in such a context likely results in a better implementation. That is largely why the above assumptions seem so generous.