Why not just copy paste or screenshot the Tweet? It's bizarre to reference a script from twitter.com directly in your site's source code and then complain that the script is doing exactly what it is supposed to.
- copy paste the content of the tweet - meta data is lost (date and time, author, obv it is possible to copy paste the text and add links to original tweet and link to an author;
- screenshot - now you dont have to add custom styles, meta data exists, but it is not usable - you can make is to click on tweet will open a tweet, but click on tweet author will open authors profile. Also screenreaders and bots - they dont parse text from images and it is harder to make images work on smaller screens.
The solution is not as simple as - ctrl+c ctrl+v text or screenshot and call it a day.
You need to consider that content will be interactive (all links should work) and accessible (for screenreaders and mobile).
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So it is understandable why low effort approach with embedded scripts, but less secure is more popular than high effort most likely not completely working, but more secure approach.
The better way would be to use twitter api and render tweets with your own styles. Safe, accessible, interactive.
Great point on accessibility, a guarantee of screen reader support is a benefit that would be lost with screenshots or text without the correct semantics.
I think that's an impossible problem to solve for the general case. To guarantee correct rendering, you very well need to push the site through the entire rendering/js pipeline.
Aesthetics and familiarity? It's a lot nicer to link the user's name directly to their profile, and the date directly to their tweet on Twitter as opposed to having a separately link or whatnot. For many, especially your average Joe/Jane, will expect the aforementioned behaviour.
Well if you want Twitter's aesthetics then you have to import their CSS/JS and let them "edit your site". Or recreate all of it yourself. What solution are people looking for exactly?
Posting the screenshot of the tweet as a link to the tweet doesn't seem like an awful solution to me. Additionally if the tweet gets deleted or the user gets banned there is still some record of it and the page doesn't have a weird gap where a tweet should be.
The problem here is that you are erasing history. Imagine someone going into the town square and yelling something profane. That can never be unheard, people will never forget. There will be record of it. Twitter is the only authority that can validate that a tweet actually happened. All other archival services can be considered questionable and easily manipulated (albeit unlikely).
Because if it's just a screenshot or your own copy/paste, I have no reason to believe it's real. The only hint of authenticity is that it's served from twitter.com. The fact that there's no way to prove a tweet even happened after it was deleted or account banned seems like a problem to me.
- screenshot - now you dont have to add custom styles, meta data exists, but it is not usable - you can make is to click on tweet will open a tweet, but click on tweet author will open authors profile. Also screenreaders and bots - they dont parse text from images and it is harder to make images work on smaller screens.
The solution is not as simple as - ctrl+c ctrl+v text or screenshot and call it a day. You need to consider that content will be interactive (all links should work) and accessible (for screenreaders and mobile).
___
So it is understandable why low effort approach with embedded scripts, but less secure is more popular than high effort most likely not completely working, but more secure approach.
The better way would be to use twitter api and render tweets with your own styles. Safe, accessible, interactive.