I have no quarrel with most of your reasoning
*.
Still, there is something curious going on with the autoplaying Macworld videos. Click to Flash will indicate or change to ’HTML5’ instead of ‘Flash’ on the placeholder it displays if it finds an alternative of that format. In this day and age that’s pretty much anywhere. However, in case of the Macworld videos it displays ‘Flash’, and never changes to HTML5 or anything else for that matter. In fact, the (now transparent) placeholder remains visible when the clip is paused or stopped. And the videos autoplay despite the CtF setting not to allow that.
*) With the possible exception of the notion that the autoplaying Macworld videos doesn’t represent an ‘instance of coding to evade blocking efforts by the user’. The many comments on the topic and particularly some responses from Macworld editors suggest that this may in fact be the case.
