PICS rating

Does it make sense? How to do it properly?

[lbobke]

A while ago, I heard of the concept of PICS labels and thought that this made sense.
So, a short while ago, I filled out a questionnaire on one of the rating services mentioned on ht*p://www.w3.org/PICS/raters.htm and added the resulting code to my homepage. Easy.
Then I had a look at some of the other services, saw that they had a meta tag tester, tried it and found that my site did not pass their test as it did not have their label.
Now, I do not want to add a new version of this code for each and every of theses sites!
Are their indeed differences? Or will one meta-tag suffice to be recognized as "non-adult" site by all filtering software?
By the way: are their any special directories that such a "child-safe" site could sign up with?
Does anyone here have any experiences using the PICS label?
Does it help or hurt a site?

Laurenz

[davidpbrown]

PICS labels are useful if you want to enable youngsters access to your site.

For other sites it's less important.

Parents should be restricting access to only those sites with labels.
Enabling access to sites with labels, and then also to sites with no labels is pointless, as many inappropriate sites will have none.

The only two labels you really need are
ICRA [icra.org...]
and Safesurf [safesurf.com...]

I also have RSAC [rsac.org...] but that page advises using ICRA instead.

The only directory/search engine I know of that effectively uses tags is Surfsafely
[surfsafely.com...]

dpb

[lbobke]

Thanks David,

still it seems a bit peculiar that you would need more than one label?!

ICRA also mentions that it is possible to use the .htaccess file for labelling.
Does this have any advantages?

Laurenz

[davidpbrown]

W3C set the standards not the implimentation. It is right that others set their own prefered characterising of content aka their own labels. Of course life is simpler if there becomes only one or two dominate standards, which I take ICRA and Safesurf to be.

I'd not heard that you could use htaccess but it makes sense.

As I understand it <meta http-equiv=" is meant to be interpreted exactly as if it were a true http header, but some agents/SE's ignore them, eg. when they do just a HEAD request.

So if you want to do a <meta http-equiv=" it is, I'm thinking, better to do it as a real header. I'm recalling that there's some problem with meta tags in XHTML 1.1, something gives me the impression they shouldn't be used, can't recall.. having them as header may be the correct way forward..

That said I'm not sure if all those who use them eg. the SE Surfsafely, would see the header, I guess they should, but it might be worth checking that they do.

dpb

[keyplyr]

I concur with davidpbrown. ICRA and SafeSurf are the important ones that many portals use for their respective filtering. Tip: you can combine these two in one meta tag :-)

<meta http-equiv="pics-label" content='(pics-1.1 
"h*tp://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html" comment "ICRAonline v2.0" l gen true for "h*tp://www.my-domain.com" r (nz 1 vz 1 lz 1 oz 1 cz 1) 
"h*tp://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l gen true 
for "h*tp://www.my-domain.com" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))'>

(code presented as example only and will not work if cut 'n pasted to any other website)

[davidpbrown]

or you can do it as a PHP header and remove the clutter of headers from the main text..

eg.
<?php
header('PICS-Label: (pics-1.1 "http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html" l r (cz 1 lz 1 nz 1 oz 1 vz 1) "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0) "http://www.classify.org/safesurf/" l r (SS~~000 1))')
?>

The W3C PICS recommendation appears to suggest headers are valid and therefore it's fair to expect PICS readers to always check the headers for PICS tags.

dpb