Comment by JoshTriplett

3 months ago

PICS is one older standard for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_...

There's also "Voluntary Content Rating", and the "RTA" marker.

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JoshTriplett

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skybrian  3 months ago

PICS and its successor (Powder) both appear to be abandoned. “Voluntary content rating” and “Rta marker” must be pretty obscure since I’m not finding a good web page.

I think these would be better thought of as attempts to create a web standard rather than an actual web standard?

  • JoshTriplett  3 months ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restricted_to_Adults

    Some of these are already voluntarily supported by many common/popular sites.

    • skybrian  3 months ago

      I did a bit of research. Looks like the <meta name="rating"> tag is supported by Google's Safe Search. Most adults probably do Google searches with "safe search" turned on (since we don't want porn sites most of the time) and this will put website owners in a dilemma. What if it's not for kids but you don't want to drop out of Google search results? That's going to discourage usage of this tag by anything other than porn sites.

      I asked ChatGPT about browser support for the meta tag. It appears to be an experimental feature in Firefox 146 that's turned off by default [1].

      So, there's some work on this feature, but it seems like another signal is needed to say "It's not porn but I don't want my website to be visible on devices that have parental controls on," which would be needed for it to get mainstream usage.

      Also, often you won't want to drop out, but just redirect kids to more appropriate content. For example, Lego's website has a popup to redirect kids to the "play zone." It might be nice to do that automatically, but the <meta name="rating"> tag isn't going to do the trick.

      [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Exp...

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