Nice to hear again about PICS. I use to label all my websites, but I've
ofter wondered if I'm the last one using this (and P3P...).
djn
Mike at Green-Beast.com wrote:
That seems incredibly arbitrary when a robots.txt is purely optional -
especially as the default spider behavior is to index all unless told
otherwise. So you're penalizing people by having your robot behave in the
opposite manner? And regarding PICS labels, most people don't know how to
set them or don't have the requisite server access. How do you justify
these?
John,
We don't necessarily penalize for not having one, we just credit for
having one (offering one is not part of our criteria [1]). It's
something we like to see. For the reasons I stated: we grade a site on
many levels, and we see that providing a robots.txt as a positive thing
that helps make a site/domain complete. Same with a PICS label, it's not
a requirement, though I believe a PICS label can actually help with
access in that some schools districts won't allow network access to site
that doesn't claim to be appropriate for the level of the students the
system serves.
Regarding "requisite server access" I don't understand. The PICS label
is put into the head of the document. If a developer doesn't understand
how to get a PICS label or can't add one to the head and don't have
access to such, I doubt they'd be submitting a site for possible awarding.
But, regardless, the main point of my reply was to clarify that the
robots.txt file has no bearing on the site's accessibility (that I'm
aware of) and that's it's just one of the many things we look for in a
quality submission.
Cheers.
Mike
[1] http://accessites.org/site/criteria/
--
-----------------------------------------
Dejan Kozina Web design studio
Dolina 346 (TS) - I-34018 Italy
tel./fax: +39 040 228 436 - cell.: +39 348 7355 225 skype: dejankozina
http://www.kozina.com/ - e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
*******************************************************************
List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm
Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
*******************************************************************
