Tripod employs a simple mechanism to place popup banner ads on its members webpages. Before the web server sends a webpage to a client, it first parses the HTML and searches for the first instance of the <HEAD> tag. It then inserts a piece of JavaScript code that, when interpreted on the client browser, opens and loads the popup.

The simple solution to prevent banner ads from appearing is to omit the <HEAD> tag and its corresponding </HEAD> tag from your webpage altogether. If the Tripod script fails to find a <HEAD> tag it doesn't bother inserting the popup code into the webpage.

At this point, I imagine a few people are squirming in their seats at the thought of this grosss violation of W3C standards, but fear not; up-do-date versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape and Opera are more than robust enough to handle this infringement of standards.