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 It is obsolete. It has been replaced by RDF Content Labels, a.k.a. POWDER: http://www.w3.org/2004/12/q/doc/content-labels-schema.htm Both PICS and RDF Content Labels are technical schemes with no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 _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
