So, I have been thinking about this Cambria Struggles in Senate Porn Hearings

[RawAlex]

Halfdeck the choices should not be between a flawed and overdone system or nothing. Supporting option A is to make half ass and burdensome third party work the gold standard. That truly would be sad.

There are other choices. Our industry could easily go back to PICS and whatnot and say, look, we want to use:

<meta http-equiv="PICS-Label" content="Adult">

Simple and short. Make sure the browser companies can handle this going forward. Put it in their next update, next release. End discussion. We can toss a simple tag in, and the children get blocked.

Supporting a flawed system means we would have to live with the flaws. That isn't a very good choice.

Alex

[Halfdeck]

Originally Posted by RawAlex

<meta http-equiv="PICS-Label" content="Adult">

Short, simple, and clean. If that tag actually worked, I'd love to use it. But from what I read regarding PICS, it requires a certain structure to work. Content='adult' seems to lie completely outside of valid PICS syntax.

As I understand it, a PICS-Label tag should declare the pics version (1.1), rating-service (where the PICS rule set and vocabulary is defined [similar to RSS files, or sitemaps where references are made to an exterior file which defines the structure of the sitemap]), and category values.

As an example, here's a tag off link-o-rama.com/ index page:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="PICS-Label" CONTENT='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l gen true comment "RSACi North America Server" for "http://www.link-o-rama.com/" on "1998.09.02T10:11-0800" r (n 4 s 4 v 0 l 3))'>

Where "(n 4 s 4 v 0 l 3)" are the category values "nudity=4, sex=4 violence=0 or 3(?)", the PIC version is 1.1 and the rule set used to be found at "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html"

For any PICS-label tag, there needs to be a file that defines the rule set, and your PICS tag uses values defined in that file to tell browsers what type of content is on that page.

In other words, if you want a "simple and short" solution, I don't see a way to do it without redefining the syntax of PICS, or as I pointed out, link off to an external file.

BTW Bill, the labels.rdf file seems to be a PICS rule set rewritten in RDF/XML -- that is why its so huge. It also refers to an XML file at "http://www.icra.org/rdfs/vocabularyv03" which defines what "na", "nb", "nc" all mean.

For example, "vj" is spelled out as "Torture ou mise à mort de personnages imaginaires (dont personnages d'animation)" in French

Modify those files, host them on your own server, and you should be able to cut out the middle man.

P.S. If all of this sound like technical mambo jumbo to you, and it is...like Walrus said, there are places besides icra.org where you can have all this code generated for you. Besides,the option not to use any tags is always there.