On 3/29/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I wouldn't turn any filtering on by default, but I have often wished for some way to filter which images are shown, usually simply because I find them distracting than because I'm actually offended by them. For example, on occasion I've looked up species of insects on Wikipedia, and if I already know what they look like, I don't usually want to have to read the whole article while staring at a close-up view of a mandible. I of course would like images to be available, but I'd like to be able to say, "don't show me insect pictures unless I ask for them", because I find it distracting. Others might want them shown, but it would be nice if logged-in users had some options. As it stands now, I have to screw around with firefox to turn off images, which is a hassle.
There are extensions, bookmarklets, user javascript hacks, rewrite proxies and greasemonkeys for these kinds of things, but I also agree that making good metadata available in standard formats is a sensible thing to do -- as long as it's not specifically limited to "potentially offensive" content. That would be POV. While some say that this kind of filtering is an evil we have to accept to make people happy, and I've shared this view in the past, I am now utterly convinced that there are very valid slippery slope concerns.
The kind of people who want offending material to be filtered will take every little gesture we make as a concession to ask for ever more filtering. And they don't want it to be filtered just for themselves. They want it to be filtered for _everyone_. Tolerance for different points of view is very alien thinking to many of the people who would install NannySitter, CyberPest or whatever they are called. What you might see as a reasonable compromise, they would see as a step on the road towards a better, cleaner InterWeb.
Erik