[cd34]

ICRA is not really difficult with their wizard. Perhaps it is too granular, but, check all the boxes and make it generic and use it across all of your sites. They have gone through the headaches and hassles to work through integration and documented things very well on their site and created a pretty easy to use wizard. The major reason I think that ICRA tags should be supported is that the 3 major kidblocker software solutions all use ICRA (and even Microsoft's IE supports ICRA tags).

Whether the system is faulty or not, it exists today. It addresses the public opinion issue today. If you introduce a new system, everyone will take time to rationalize it, decide why it is better or worse, and finally start implementing it. Lets say that you're talking 18 months to get everyone to agree and implement. What legislation could be passed in 18 months if there is no forward progress? How long do you think it would take to come up with a simple tag that everyone agreed upon, convince the search engines to use it, convince the browsers to use it, convince the parents to use it? You have that already with the rating=restricted tag and yet, a quick scan of 2000 pages tells me that about 87% of the sites are not tagging. That tag has been in use since 97 or so.

I am certainly not a fan of Cambria and his stumbles in front of the senate certainly did more harm than good. But, perhaps as a group we can put something together as a recommendation that says:

We've looked at the issue, we've developed the following 'best practices' list which we would advise all sites, FSC members or not to follow. It is what we are going to follow because we've determined it to address the issues now rather than waiting for it to be legislated.

If the FSC receives something pointed like that, which has supporting documentation, recommendations, endorsements and even preliminary adoption of a solution that works today that cuts the time to implement any future decided system dramatically, I cannot see how they wouldn't pass that along as suggestions to the rest of their members.

Perhaps the FSC isn't operating in our best interest -- perhaps they don't know they aren't. Bill has the right idea -- someone needs to step up as a liason with them and hash out the issues. But, from where I am sitting right now, I still firmly believe that using a system today that some see as faulty is better than waiting to implement until the perfect solution is available.