Forum Moderators: phranque
It's aim is to protect children from potentially harmful material while protecting the free speech rights of content providers.
These tags can be somewhat lengthy and add extra loadtime to pages. Who uses these standards? Do any IPs actually determine what websites are included in their SERPs because of these (or lack of) tags?
Does AOL use PICS to determine their parental controls ratings? Are these ratings stored in their IP cache and used to later filter Google SERPs?
Are these PICS tags really necessary?
I have used ICRA tags on my pages to keep kiddies safe from what their parents may deem to be "politically-incorrect" content.
The only agent I have found that pays attention to these tags is the browser. For example, Internet Explorer's "Zones" can be set up to accept or reject various levels of sex, violence, drug use, etc."
You can experiment with this in the Internet Options->Content->Content Advisor settings.
Adding the tags can be quick and easy, or it can be quite time-consuming. The quick version is to put one tag on your top-level index page, and specify that it applies to all pages on the site. Pages other that your index page do not need to be modified. However, this means that a request for a non-index page will result in a HEAD request to /index.hmtl, as the browser retrieves the site-wide content tag. This increases server load, and slows down page loading, but only if the user has enabled the Content Advisor.
The second level is to put a site-wide tag on all of your pages, or at least on the most popular ones. This precludes the need for the browser to do the HEAD request on /index.html to get the tags. This is faster and reduces the server load.
The third level is to put custom tags on each page. For a big site, this would be a lot of work.
Another option is to have several sets of tags which apply to different branches of your site's pathnames, with the tag residing in the index page at the top of your various directory branches - the ICRA tagging method is very flexible, and you can mix and match the methods above.
I put the tags in after noticing that if the content filtering features in IE are enabled, then the default IE behaviour is to block pages lacking a content tag. I suspect that this behaviour results in very few people actually using the feature, because most Web pages don't include the tag.
However, if you have any content that a reasonable person might find offensive for themselves or for their kids, then it's prudent to include the content rating to avoid legal problems. If not, I wouldn't bother.
It's been a long time since I installed these tags and things may have changed, but I have never found any content-tag related action except on the client side. Some of those "Kid-Safe" sites may do something special with the tags, but I don't know.
Jim
