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The NSFW HTML Attribute
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Dec 29, 2006 08:32 AM
from the thought-provoking dept.
from the thought-provoking dept.
phaln writes "Over at The Frosty Mug Revolution, PJ Doland makes a compelling case for a new HTML attribute in the spirit of the highly-regarded 'nofollow' attribute promoted by Google — the NSFW attribute (rel='nsfw'). His original idea has been refined and expanded by positive comments from readers, resulting in a semantic solution to the issue he raises in the original post. From the article: 'Content creators can apply the attribute to paragraph tags, div tags, or any other block-level element. Doing so will indicate that the enclosed content is not safe for work. Visitors will be able to configure their browsers to block display of just the content enclosed by the flagged block-level element. This isn't about censorship. It is about making us all less likely to accidentally click on a goatse.cx link when our boss is standing behind us. It is also about making us feel more comfortable posting possibly objectionable content by giving visitors a means of easily filtering that content.'"
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The NSFW HTML Attribute
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Re:Good idea - No, bad idea. (Score:4, Funny)
Too bad they don't have a "Not Safe For Moderation" tag.
Re:Good idea - No, bad idea. (Score:4, Insightful)
According to MPAA v. 2600, the government mandates using the <a> tag along with the href attribute and a link to a website with the DeCSS code subjects you to civil liability. Not exactly opt in.
Porn sites are not going to use the proposed tag, exactly as your question suggests. And that is why the government will try to mandate it. You call it a slippery slope. I call it a likely outcome.
Nice troll though. Looks like you snagged a few moderators.
Not trollish by any means. I wish there were a Godwin for comments like yours. Since only one moderation occurred at the time of your post, I assume you are just trying to fill in space with this?
Re:Good idea - No, bad idea. (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Tuesday December 19 2006, @05:12PM)
The same information would have to be available on any printed publication or movie.
WTF (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.mways.co.uk/)
Jolyon
Re:Good idea (Score:5, Informative)
PICS labels [w3.org] have been around since 1996, and were proposed [w3.org] to label for language, violence, and sexual content (among others).
ASACP RTA [asacp.org] is another labelling scheme from 1996.
ICRA labels [icra.org] have been doing the same since 1999.
RTA and ICRA are in active use today. PICS fell mostly away (to my knowledge) -- probably because it wasn't just for filtering, but for any kind of content tagging. Being a general solution doesn't get the "save the children" mouth-breathers behind you.
The problem with the rel=nsfw is that it is binary. I can't establish any kind of scale for what I want to see (nudity is okay, sex acts are not), and it only filters in one dimension (I can't say that I am okay with sex, but not with violence, or vice-versa for the U.S.A.).
The trolls... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.ev4.org/)
Re:The trolls... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The trolls... (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. For this to work would require everyone's cooperation. I think that, if anything, the internet has proven that you are guaranteed to run into any amount of uncooperative people. What's next, a law mandating the use of this flag?
If you're at work and just clicking on random links in front of your boss, well, you deserve what you get.
Re:The trolls... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.pandora.com/people/apt142 | Last Journal: Friday March 16 2007, @02:15PM)
Re:The trolls... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.ceyah.org/~jandrese/ | Last Journal: Thursday September 13, @11:11AM)
Irrelevant (Score:5, Insightful)
In order for this to work, it should be included in third party descriptions of the site. And then, you can rely on standard content filters for that.
Re:But universal close tag not flexible enough... (Score:5, Informative)
<i>this <b>is a</i> test sequence</b>
It seems silly, but it is valid html that doesn't perfectly nest as would be required for a universal close tag.
Re:uh.. what? (Score:5, Informative)
There's plenty of places where NSFW is specified in link text already. This is just a way of making it machine-readable.
Such shortcuts [w3.org] have already existed since HTML 2 [ietf.org]. These have been universally ignored by browser developers.
ambiguous (Score:4, Informative)
Two problems (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday January 19 2007, @04:54PM)
I see two problems with this right of the bat.
First, what's "not safe for work" varies from place to place. Not only from country to country (there are government sponsored pro-breast feeding billboards all over the place where I am that I'm sure would be considered "not safe for work" back home) but from employer to employer as well. Two jobs back (in the states) people would occasionally have risque material showing on their monitors and nothing much was said, while one co-worker got a serious dressing-down for shopping on-line for a competitors product.
And probably more importantly, in many cases no one is looking over your shoulder but IT is still logging your web traffic (e.g. at the proxy). And it often isn't just (or even mostly) boobies they're worried about. I've seen more flags raised over warz, drug-related material (don't search for "how to beat drug tests" from your desk), stock trading concerns, cracking tools, and so forth.
It's a cute idea, but I don't think it's going to go too far.
--MarkusQ
I can't se any good coming of this. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://robvincent.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 09, @01:55PM)
Do we really want to just start trusting links and clicking whatever because the invisible tags will surely protect us from doing something we shouldn't at work?
I propose a slew of such tags (Score:5, Funny)
nsbc: Not Safe Before Coffee
nsbl: Not Safe Before Lunch
nsfc: Not Safe in Female Company
nspt: Not Safe to Print on a Tee
nswc: Not Safe While drinking Coffee
nswe: Not Safe While Eating
wcwd: Warning Chick With a Dick
dne: Do Not Eat
Not about cenorship... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it hasn't worked out quite like they said it would, has it? Illinois did pass a law anyway, fortunately it was shot down by the courts - but guys like Jack Thompson are still out there just looking to befriend any politician that needs a little censor-happy rabble-rousing to get himself re-elected.
Meanwhile Wal-mart now refuses to carry any games with too extreme of a rating, effectively brow-beating the game authors into self-censorship if they want to have any hope of enough sales to recoup their investment.
It isn't too hard to see something like this proposed standard turning into the online equivalent of that sort of thing -- unless your website is certified by an ESRB-like agency as 'properly' using this NSFW flag, you'll be black-listed by all the big net-nanny commercial filters - thus putting yet another unnecessary burden on a website's author to comply or be left out of the corporately accessible world.
Under such a regime, most discussion sites would end up filtered because it would be impossible to enforce an NSFW tagging requirement. If you value being able to read slashdot at work, you don't want to support this proposal.
Absolutely /not/ semantic (Score:5, Informative)
(http://kurtmckee.org/)
this wont help me any (Score:5, Funny)
Re:this wont help me any (Score:5, Funny)
Take it one step further... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://mogrify.org/)
his needs a sitewide solution, too - "nofollow" has robots.txt, so why not have nsfw.txt?
Or for some sites, just:
Could be useful.
Follow-on attributes ? (Score:5, Interesting)
At first glance, this almost sounds reasonable, until you stop and think about it. It relies on the content creator to somehow guess what's "objectionable," and put the tag in the appropriate place. That's always assuming they're going to bother, and that every browser is going to go and put the ability to properly render this in.
If it passes, I can see a whole new range of "NSF" attributes. "Not safe for children.(NSFC)" "Not safe for (fill in the blank)". Now that I think about it, the NSFC tag would have a certain appeal, but it's still a dumb idea.
It isn't *intended* to be a catch-all (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.crushingdreams.com/)
The people who post links so that you'll get embarrassed or even in trouble at work don't even enter into it, they have absolutely nothing at all to do with why this idea is proposed.
That being said I still think it's a niche idea with positive intentions that would never get widespread adoption, I don't think every potential problem should be solved with technology, some things still need human interpretation.
My deepest thanks (Score:3, Funny)
Why not use PICS/ICRA stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)
NSFW proposal considered bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://silmaril.ie/cgi-bin/blog)
This isn't an attribute (REL is the attribute); it's an attribute value. REL is already declared as CDATA, meaning it can have any value you want, so what Mr Doland is really looking for is browser recognition of the string NSFW, not any change to HTML.
I wish him good luck: this seems like a sensible solution. A pity that the proposal has been approached in such a manner.
///Peter
Wow, what an idiot solution! (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Monday February 13 2006, @07:11PM)
Instead of inventing something redundant here, just have browsers installed at work block access to pages rated as "breast exposure", or whatever. There is already a standard with very fine-grained control of exactly what a web page contains, if it's "visible sexual touching", language, or whatever, and the administration can then decide on exactly what they wish to allow. You can even tell that it's "nudity, but in a medical context" if you intend to loosen up the regulations in special cases.
http://www.icra.org/label/generator/ [icra.org]
ICRA is supported by Internet Explorer and while strangely enough Firefox don't seem to have built-in support for these schemes to aid for website classification, there should be extensions like ViQ for Firefox [unimi.it] to add this support, although I haven't tested it.
Of course, few sites today use this system well, but that's still being vastly better off than inventing some new inflexible "nsfw" HTML attribute, and modifying the HTML standard. Wow...
Not safe for whose work? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm guessing that NSFW in my San Francisco office is different from NSFW in rural Alabama, or Germany, or Saudi Arabia, or China...
The germ of a good idea, but completely unworkable.