Marco, thanks for raising this and thanks to Dan Bri for altering me to
your question.
I'm CTO at the Family Online Safety Institute [1] which includes ICRA
and chair of the POWDER WG [2] so I'm probably reasonably well placed to
answer your question.
As of today, PICS remains a W3C Recommendation so if HTML 5 is not going
to support it in any way, that strikes me as questionable. PICS
continues to be supported in Internet Explorer and, much to my surprise,
this feature was updated to work with the current ICRA vocabulary in
IE7. This was based on research that MSFT did into its usage which found
that 'just enough' people used it to warrant its retention. I don't know
whether it will survive into IE 8. We do still issue PICS labels
(alongside an RDF-based label, the syntax for which is not standardised).
With that on the table I've spent a lot of energy over the last few
years working towards seeing PICS withdrawn in favour of something that
can do what it does but smarter and better - which is what POWDER is
about. From my point of view, and this is echoed by what MSFT told me at
the time of the Content Advisor update for IE7, PICS is a legacy system
that we need to support for a while longer yet - but no one, least of
all me, is arguing for it to be updated - the major update for PICS is
well established. It's called RDF.
So what is the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER)? It's a
way to attach content descriptions to collections of resources (e.g. a
Web site) - a way to create RDF triples about lots of things at once. A
POWDER document is a separate XML file that has a GRDDL transform
associated with its namespace which, if performed, will yield RDF/OWL*.
Description Resources have 3 key elements:
- attribution (who is making the description)
- scope (what is described)
- the actual description which can be provided as RDF terms (i.e.
controlled vocabularies) or free text tags
We plan to use FOAF for the attribution side of things and provide hooks
for authentication routes so that the trustworthiness of the description
can be established.
What do we need for HTML 5?
Just the link/rel element. A POWDER link will be something like
<link rel="powder" href="powder.xml" type="application/xml" />
so no surprises there. The relationship type of powder may become
'describedBy' - that's something we'll be deciding within the next
couple of weeks.
Actually, one of the problems with PICS is that it has a peculiar syntax
which a lot of WYSIWYG HTML editors muck up so a constraint on POWDER is
that we make use of well-recognised HTML elements.
The e-mail thread you pointed to on the TAG mailing list is about being
able to put that link into an HTTP Header. We actually recommend this
for ICRA labels based on the fact that HTTP Link was in an older spec
but got dropped. Mark Nottingham has an updated Internet Draft [3] and
the basic plan there is that the value of the rel attribute is a URI.
Relative URIs are relative to the IANA namespace, so we'll probably be
working to register our relationship type there but I know I also need
to follow up on a conversation I had with Hixie about this in Boston in
November and get it in the HTML 5 list too so all bases are covered.
In summary, unless we make a complete lash up, POWDER's main tech
documents will be at Last Call around the end of this month and into CR
over the summer. PICS will be withdrawn in its favour around the end of
this year. Support for extensible relationship types is important to us.
Support for PICS less so.
HTH
Phil.
[1] http://www.fosi.org/
[2] http://www.w3.org/2007/powder/
* Yes, the GRDDL transform will produce RDF/OWL but for full logical
processing, a couple of 'semantic extensions' need to be implemented.
[3]
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-nottingham-http-link-header-01.txt
--
Phil Archer
Chief Technical Officer,
Family Online Safety Institute
w. http://www.fosi.org/people/philarcher/
Marco wrote:
Hello.
I've been looking through the HTML5 working draft and I've been trying
to find a reference for the use of the current PICS labels.
I noticed that the new specs only give three accepted keywords for the
http-equiv attribute, which doesn't include the current "pics-label":
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#http-equiv0
Being a custom attribute, it makes sense that you wouldn't want to
promote this type of thing.
Having said that, I was searching within the new specs for a way of
accurately describing one's content. I'm somewhat aware of the W3C
POWDER WG and the only post that I could find that was recent and
relative to this is here:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2008Mar/0114.html
The closest type of markup that comes close to describing content that
is accepted with the HTML5 validator is the current ICRA label:
<link rel="meta" href="http://yoursite.com/labels.xml";
type="application/rdf+xml" title="ICRA labels" />
My question is: what is the direction for describing the type of content
you would have within the context of the HTML5 working draft?
Looking over the latest working draft, the closest I could see to where
this might possibly be applicable is section 3.3.4 - Transparent content
models. Would it be that you'd have markup right in the body that is
considered transparent but describes the content on the page? Or, would
you take something like the approach with the ICRA example above?
If anyone has insight into this, I'd certainly appreciate it.
Regards,
Marco Battilana
