On 09/05/10 20:55, Chad wrote:
This came up
in discussion a while ago on WHATWG - PICS is actually
dead. Even its creators have given up on it. No-one implements it. As
a standard, it's got no backing. So we'd be the first significant
organisation to actually take it seriously, and would be reviving it.
Forwarding this to wikitech-l solely for the technical discussion.
I was unaware that it had died. Do you have any links from ICRA on
the issue? I know Derk-Jan has been looking at resurrecting that bug,
and I'd be interested to know what the actual state of the standard is.
If nobody uses it and they've declared it dead, then we don't need to
bother implementing it. Do we know if there is some standard that is
used widely, or does every web filtering package reinvent the wheel?
PICS was a W3C proposed standard for tagging content. It is obsolete.
It has been replaced by RDF Content Labels, a.k.a. POWDER:
http://www.w3.org/2004/12/q/doc/content-labels-schema.htm
Both PICS and RDF Content Labels are technical schemes with no moral
values attached.
ICRA provides a set of labels (the "ICRA vocabulary") relevant to
prevailing Christian morality. It can be used with either PICS or RDF.
Companies that sell filtering software tend to be coy about how they
classify pages, since content analysis heuristics certainly play a big
role. ICRA gives links to two content filters that support their tags.
One is a simple browser plugin, the other is a large and complex
content classification system suitable for filtering internet access
for schools, businesses or ISPs.
http://www.profiltechnology.com/en/index.aspx
Profil looks big enough that if it does indeed support ICRA/RDF, then
I think that's a good enough reason to write an extension.
Note that there are lots of other applications for RDF Content Labels.
In particular, accessibility and copyright/license tagging have been
promoted. I think we could have some generic support for RDF in the
core, with the ICRA vocabulary and UI in an extension.
-- Tim Starling