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You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start. First, it's obvious that you don't develop web pages a lot and if you do, haven't really started using CSS to a greater extent than setting font and background colors. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Internet Explorer has okay support for HTML (it's still a lot of tags it doesn't support there, like ABBR), good support for CSS Level 1, but terrible (and I mean excruciatingly, painfully, wreckingly bad) support for CSS Level 2 (note that the original CSS2 specification is found here and is 8 years old).

You talk about "The W3C specifications" and what good support IE has for them without being specific about which it supports well. This also leads me to believe that you have no idea of what you are talking about. There are a lot of specifications W3C has released that Internet Explorer either supports half-way with a lot of bugs (like CSS2, PNG, DOM Level 2) and some not at all (like XHTML, SVG, XForms and DOM Level 3). The greatest problem with IE is not the lack of support for newer (well, "newer" is relative, considering that the PNG specification is 10 years old and the SVG specification is 5 years old) specifications, but the half-way support it has for standards like CSS2 and PNG.

Had it not supported it, and supported HTML the way it's defined (like OBJECT for example), creating fallbacks would be easy. With half-way support, you need to resort to all sorts of hacks to make something work, because IE claims to support it fully, but doesn't, and thus breaks completely if you try to follow the standard.

Claiming that Microsoft is active in any of these working groups is either a truth with modifications or a blatant lie. Had Microsoft been active in developing any of these specifications, wouldn't you agree that it's a bit odd that the company as a whole and Internet Explorer particularly supports some of them so badly and yet more of them not at all? The obvious fact is that Microsoft haven't been involved in developing any of these specifications and still after almost 9 years haven't managed to read and understand the the first HTML 4.0 Specification completely.

No, Internet Explorer does not have good support for "the W3C specifications". It supports some specifications okay, some badly and some not at all. Not having full support for HTML 4.01 and CSS2 in 2006 is just embarrassing. Oh, and both background and valign are defined in the HTML 4.01 specification (e.g. they're "standard"), and they're attributes, not tags.

On a last note, I'd like to point out what's been pointed out many times already, namely that the method Explorer Destroyer uses to detect Internet Explorer and all the code surrounding it, is horrific, terrible, very unsolid and simply said very bad. Don't use it.

You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start. First, it's obvious that you don't develop web pages a lot and if you do, haven't really started using CSS to a greater extent than setting font and background colors. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Internet Explorer has okay support for HTML (it's still a lot of tags it doesn't support there, like ABBR), good support for CSS Level 1, but terrible (and I mean excruciatingly, painfully, wreckingly bad) support for CSS Level 2 (note that the original CSS2 specification is found here and is 8 years old).

You talk about "The W3C specifications" and what good support IE has for them without being specific about which it supports well. This also leads me to believe that you have no idea of what you are talking about. There are a lot of specifications W3C has released that Internet Explorer either supports half-way with a lot of bugs (like CSS2, PNG, DOM Level 2) and some not at all (like XHTML, SVG, XForms and DOM Level 3). The greatest problem with IE is not the lack of support for newer (well, "newer" is relative, considering that the PNG specification is 10 years old and the SVG specification is 5 years old) specifications, but the half-way support it has for standards like CSS2 and PNG.

Had it not supported it, and supported HTML the way it's defined (like OBJECT for example), creating fallbacks would be easy. With half-way support, you need to resort to all sorts of hacks to make something work, because IE claims to support it fully, but doesn't, and thus breaks completely if you try to follow the standard.

Claiming that Microsoft is active in any of these working groups is either a truth with modifications or a blatant lie. Had Microsoft been active in developing any of these specifications, wouldn't you agree that it's a bit odd that the company as a whole and Internet Explorer particularly supports some of them so badly and yet more of them not at all? The obvious fact is that Microsoft haven't been involved in developing any of these specifications and still after almost 9 years haven't managed to read and understand the the first HTML 4.0 Specification completely.

No, Internet Explorer does not have good support for "the W3C specifications". It supports some specifications okay, some badly and some not at all. Not having full support for HTML 4.01 and CSS2 in 2006 is just embarrassing. Oh, and both background and valign are defined in the HTML 4.01 specification (e.g. they're "standard"), and they're attributes, not tags.

On a last note, I'd like to point out what's been pointed out many times already, namely that the method Explorer Destroyer uses to detect Internet Explorer and all the code surrounding it, is horrific, terrible, very unsolid and simply said very bad. Don't use it.

You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start. First, it's obvious that you don't develop web pages a lot and if you do, haven't really started using CSS to a greater extent than setting font and background colors. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Internet Explorer has okay support for HTML (it's still a lot of tags it doesn't support there, like ABBR), good support for CSS Level 1, but terrible (and I mean excruciatingly, painfully, wreckingly bad) support for CSS Level 2 (note that the original CSS2 specification is found here and is 8 years old).

You talk about "The W3C specifications" and what good support IE has for them without being specific about which it supports well. This also leads me to believe that you have no idea of what you are talking about. There are a lot of specifications W3C has released that Internet Explorer either supports half-way with a lot of bugs (like CSS2, PNG, DOM Level 2) and some not at all (like XHTML, SVG, XForms and DOM Level 3). The greatest problem with IE is not the lack of support for newer (well, "newer" is relative, considering that the PNG specification is 10 years old and the SVG specification is 5 years old) specifications, but the half-way support it has for standards like CSS2 and PNG.

Had it not supported it, and supported HTML the way it's defined (like OBJECT for example), creating fallbacks would be easy. With half-way support, you need to resort to all sorts of hacks to make something work, because IE claims to support it fully, but doesn't, and thus breaks completely if you try to follow the standard.

Claiming that Microsoft is active in any of these working groups is either a truth with modifications or a blatant lie. Had Microsoft been active in developing any of these specifications, wouldn't you agree that it's a bit odd that the company as a whole and Internet Explorer particularly supports some of them so badly and yet more of them not at all? The obvious fact is that Microsoft haven't been involved in developing any of these specifications and still after almost 9 years haven't managed to read and understand the the first HTML 4.0 Specification completely.

No, Internet Explorer does not have good support for "the W3C specifications". It supports some specifications okay, some badly and some not at all. Not having full support for HTML 4.01 and CSS2 in 2006 is just embarrassing. Oh, and both background and valign are defined in the HTML 4.01 specification (e.g. they're "standard"), and they're attributes, not tags.

On a last note, I'd like to point out what's been pointed out many times already, namely that the method Explorer Destroyer uses to detect Internet Explorer and all the code surrounding it, is horrific, terrible, very unsolid and simply said very bad. Don't use it.

IIRC, according to the actual specs, <! is actually the start and > is the end.

You do not recall correctly. According to the HTML 4.0 Specification, the <! is the SGML markup declaration open delimiter and the -- is the comment open delimiter and White space is not permitted between them.

I'm not going to bother pointing out why .xxx is a bad idea; others have done it for me already. But about those someones "in charge of ensuring that all the girls on the sites are over 18", 18 USC 2257 (in the United States, at least) enforces a requirement to that effect. Most porn sites already label themselves with a variety of metadata. (View-source on a porn site's front page and see for yourself.) So, what else are you suggesting, then?

I <3 Judge Edwards works for me.

But you need to use the HTML Entity Reference for the less-than symbol.

My dearest friend,
I fully agree with the newspaper example, etc. . . maybe you should see what THE FUTURE has in store. Of course, css3 is a long ways away, but some day, reading things on the web will be easy on the eyes (maybe; there's always gonna be some ass with blink tags and frames in frames in frames).

Why both with the Wikipedia article, when you can post links to the inventor's own history of the first web browser (source code; written for NeXTStep for 680x0 I believe).

Why both with the Wikipedia article, when you can post links to the inventor's own history of the first web browser (source code; written for NeXTStep for 680x0 I believe).

Hey, man, I know what you mean. Hold on, I need to open this other page in a new tab... there we go. Alright, I agree. I mean Firefox is definitely better in the standards department than its Microshaft counterpart, but it still isn't perfect. Why the hell doesn't Mozilla get faster volunteers?! They are a "corporation" now, after all. I mean half of the SVG standards don't work on Mozilla browsers. Check out the w3schools tutorial and you'll see that all the animation examples are just static pages. Of course, it is ABM - anything but M$. I really wish Mozilla would demonstrate their dedication to the web and a standardized web by fully standardizing their browser. Hell, I have a T1 connection; I can handle a few extra megabytes. I am also outraged at how MathML doesn't render absolutely perfectly without 3 extra fonts. That is inexcusable to me, working at a lab as I do. And I too wish that CSS was more fully supported. I'd much rather use the flexible steel of predefined CSS than the brittle rubberband known as dynamic JavaScript. So, in summary, browser companies or developers should stop adding so many features but should focus more on keeping up with new standards. One new standard a week is no big deal; any good businessman knows that to keep ahead, you have to develop quality with haste. I swear, I'd switch to Amaya if only it had better features.

Eh-hemm, though it does appear to have stagnated a bit of late there is Amaya

...My earlier comment on Digg when this story showed up there.

Personally I couldn't give two shits about _any_ browser getting "new and exciting!!!!" features right at the moment, and my reason is very simple,

They all fail at what they are supposed to do, first and foremost. Some fail utterly, and other fail a little bit, but they all _fail_.

There is not a single browser available for download at the moment that _fully_ supports the web standards laid down by the W3C, http://w3.org/ and developers who are working on Safari, Konqueror, Mozilla Firefox and Seamonkey, IE, Opera, Camino, and so on, all need to take a step back from their computers and say,

"Hey, how come we're adding new features to a program that isn't even standards-compliant?"

The continual lack of support for even the full subset of CSS 1 and 2.1 makes designing pages based on XHTML and CSS a frickin' pain in the arse.

If there was one browser, even just one, that was cross-platform and fully supported even just HTML, XHTML, CSS 1 and 2.1 (maybe even parts of 3), and was extensible to support such things as SVG and XVRML, then I would be using it in a damn shot, and then I'd _know_ that when a page failed to render properly, _I_ screwed up, not a bug in the browser.

Stop adding features guys, just follow the damn standards.

All I want, and I'm betting so do a great deal of other people who work with the web, is a browser that follows the standards for HTML, XHTML, CSS 1 & 2 (maybe even 3), Javascript, and DOM.

Extra features are nice, yes, but the top priority should be putting out a browser that follows the standards, first and foremost.

What good are extensions and themes and fancy bookmarking tools if the core program for seeing information on the web cannot render pages which have been correctly created?

In my opinion, web developers should aim to make their sites usable for as many different browsers as is reasonably possible.

As much as I hate developing around IE's shortcomings and agree with your other comments, particularly on the translucent PNGs, one handy thing IE introduced years ago is overflow-x and overflow-y. It's not a CSS standard (proposed for CSS 3 though, but it's been so handy that Firefox started supporting it in the 1.5 release. I rather wish Safari and Opera were updated to support this too.

Sir or madam, if your coding style matches your posting style, I suspect that your HTML is awfully bloated. It's just a suggestion, but please focus on your points and leave out the lengthy descriptions.

Second, for people learning HTML right now, I really recommend the Amaya editor from the World-Wide Web Consortium, at http://www.w3.org/Amaya/. It's open source, well-structured, generates clean code without thousands of lines of unnecessary style and inclusions that the Microsoft editors generate, and encourages people to look at what they're doing and the resulting code.

The complexity of HTML now really does make it equivalent to a programming language, well worth learning, even if technically it's only a markup language.

Ah yes, it's true the first web pages were seen in grey scale. The links were underlined and turned blue in color. It seemed to have worked then and it's still a choice most browsers give the user. Interfaces have moved on and some people have fun with successfully and not so successfully.

The M$ people have yet to catch up with the overall UI provided by Next. Window Maker is a much easier to use desktop than any version of Windows. Enlightenment is better than either.

Standards? Like the standards that Slashdot doesn't obey themselves? And how about Unicode? Slashdot doesn't support that, either.

Don't throw stones in glass houses, buddy. At least Microsoft updates their software.

Does anyone think this is the first time this problem has come up? In the early 90s, a 'big' screen was 800x600 pixels. Lots of people were still using 640x480. That is what all the advice which we have been giving you for a decade about NEVER using absolute positioning and absolute sizes on the Web is all about.

You do not control the size of the real estate your page is rendered on. You do not control the number of pixels per inch. You do not control the visual acuity of your users' eyes. And you never did! If your site does not work as well on a mobile phone as on a 3000x2000 pixel display, then, as a web designer, you've failed. No-one else is to blame, you're to blame. You can't do your job.

Messing about with pixel values is pointless, because if you're using pixel values you have already failed. Of course, yes, there is a problem with the size of graphic elements. That's why we should be using Scalable Vector Graphics wherever possible; this is why it's serious that some browser vendors are still dragging their feet on native SVG support. But that doesn't excuse you, the designer. Your job as a designer is to work with the web you've got, which includes crappy antique browsers. Get on with it.

Using px for 2 (or any other number of) pixels per pixel is plainly stupid. Pixel is just a pixel.

Could you please tell the W3C that, because the CSS specifications all say that a pixel's size depends on multiple factors.

If web developers used px as measurement, and now they are realising that their design would not work with higher resolutions, it is their stupidity.

No, they are stupid for expecting browsers to follow the specification instead of your mistaken interpretation of the specification. "Pixel" is a bit of a misnomer with respect to CSS, every time you see "px", it's actually a relative unit, not a physical measurement.

A fully scalable, vector-based browsing experience would be nice. SVG.

Toss in support for animation, SVG again.

full-motion video, foreignObject.

and client-side programming in something other than JavaScript, please. Python.

And 3D, while we've got the hood up. canvas + OpenGL.

Let's call it XAML. Is that good with everyone?
I'd prefer to call it a set of open standards.

A fully scalable, vector-based browsing experience would be nice. SVG.

Toss in support for animation, SVG again.

full-motion video, foreignObject.

and client-side programming in something other than JavaScript, please. Python.

And 3D, while we've got the hood up. canvas + OpenGL.

Let's call it XAML. Is that good with everyone?
I'd prefer to call it a set of open standards.

A fully scalable, vector-based browsing experience would be nice. SVG.

Toss in support for animation, SVG again.

full-motion video, foreignObject.

and client-side programming in something other than JavaScript, please. Python.

And 3D, while we've got the hood up. canvas + OpenGL.

Let's call it XAML. Is that good with everyone?
I'd prefer to call it a set of open standards.

Excuse me but isn't a pixel an elementary PICture ELement?

The atom was once thought indivisible, but it has elements. The proton was later divided into quarks and gluons. Likewise, the pixel is already divided into red, green, and blue subpixels under ClearType, so why not divide it into northwest, northeast, southwest, and southeast pixels?

Besides, the W3C recommendation that defines CSS length units doesn't necessarily define "pixel" to refer to any picture element. On high-resolution output devices, a pixel is 1/2688 radians of visual angle.

It would be nice if in addition to that, it were possible to use measurements of centimeters or inches

It's part of CSS 2.

But this user controlled scaling should be part of the OS not the browser or even worse in CSS, where 'pixel' starts to mean 'angle'.
The person who lost his glasses wants to control the font sizes not only in web pages. Or the eagle-eyed person wants to have small text in all apps.

In RiscOS there was a system of logical and physical pixels; applications only dealt with the logical ones.
There even was a screen mode for the visually impaired to have a ratio of 4.
The font subsystem provided very good anti-aliasing, making even 6 pt text very readable. (But they cheated: the font definitions had extra information for hinting and scaffolding.)

I can only hope that 300dpi screens are coming soon...

<rant subject="font rendering">
RiscOS font drawing didn't suffer from jumps in weight or size like Windows does.
Type a line of text in MS Word then copy the line 7 times. Now make for each line the text one point larger then the previous, start at size 10. You'll see that the top half of the lines the font has a lower weight then the bottom half! And the sizes are not linear, the last characters should be on a straight diagonal!
If you can have good anti-aliasing on a 25 Mhz ARM3 & 4 MB RAM and only 8 shades of gray, you could have superb font rendering on a modern pc.
But hell, no: MS gives us 'Font Smoothing' and 'Cleartype' which should be called 'Font Blurring' and 'Moirétype'.
And why can't I have a 7.35 point font size?? My 1991 machine could do it.
</rant>

Ever since the seperation of style and content via CSS, the web has been moving much faster towards the goal of being equally well rendered in every medium. This is why you should measure fonts in ems rather than pixels, and measure other elements in percentages or ems. That way, your site will look just as good on a projector as it will on a mobile phone. With a move to liquid layouts and SVG, and a lack of references to pixels, the devices the webpage will be rendered on should become completely irrelevant to web developers.

The idea is logically flawed. Think about what a domain in the DNS actually is: it is an organisational unit. It makes no sense to separate out certain types of content into an entirely separate organisational unit. hustler.com is not a separate organisation from hustler.xxx.

It is not granular enough. A binary value of porn/not porn is so glib as to be useless. Who decides what is porn and what is not? What about servers in different countries? PICS solves all this; web authors rate the content they post based on objective criteria. For example, the RSAC rating service specifies four number of scales upon which a resource can be rated: violence, sex, nudity and language. A resource is rated from 0 to 4 on each of these scales. The values for the nudity scale are "none", "revealing attire", "partial nudity", "non-sexual frontal nudity" and "provocative frontal nudity".

It is not backwards-compatible. URIs should not change, but .xxx would force everyone to split their sites up and move half of them to an entirely different domain.

It solves the problem at the wrong level. PICS ratings, by contrast, are embedded in the HTTP header of a resource (including, in the case of HTML resources, the elements inside the element.

Wow, you are right! Ads, terms & conditions, and a privacy policy. What the hell happened???? It has been a long while since I visited their site.

They used to be known as RSAC who just put out a simple comma-delimited blob that you could put in a meta tag. It worked a lot like robots.txt. This really pisses me off.

It looks like our next best hope is the W3C group on the subject. But the W3C will take years to do what really is only a few minutes of real work. :-(

We already have rating systems that are in use and allow for self-rating. If there was demand for a search engine that only returned rated pages, I'm sure Google or someone would have set one up.

In fact, why don't the government simply pay someone to set up a search engine that only returns filtered pages? Sure, it's a waste of tax dollars, but if they're so sure it's needed, better that than some ill thought out piece of unnecessary legislation.

We already have rating systems that are in use and allow for self-rating. If there was demand for a search engine that only returned rated pages, I'm sure Google or someone would have set one up.

In fact, why don't the government simply pay someone to set up a search engine that only returns filtered pages? Sure, it's a waste of tax dollars, but if they're so sure it's needed, better that than some ill thought out piece of unnecessary legislation.

If they actually gave a shit about the content that young children are exposed to, then they would push for a .xxx domain name. Don't want XXX? filter it out.

Great, more morons who don't understand PICS. At least this is better than the .xxx domain.

This seems like a plum violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Employers and potential employers must offer alternative means to submit a job application. Differerntly-abled individuals with visual and motor impairments could make an excellent case. ADA guidelines and California rules and interpretations of the law are already having significant impact on my employer. Web developers who don't consider accessibility might want to consider alternative employment as your employer may soon be sued.

Wow you sure know your history better than I do. I had NO idea that Apple System 6 had a HTML based Widget technology on the desktop... Especially since HTML didn't exist for 4 years after System 6 was released. So tell me, when did Apple start predicting the future and innovating based on things that didn't exist yet?

While I agree with this in theory. I have a few remarks.

1. That's definitly not the right meta tag. Content-Type specifies the mime-type of the document. Normally it should be something like text/plain, text/html, application/xml+xhtml (or something similar, look in /usr/share/mime for a good list). Doing this would break a gazillion things, and is just plain wrong anyways. You should use another type of meta tag that is designed particularly for this.
2. For that other type of meta tag system, see PICS: http://www.w3.org/PICS/. PICS is already implemented on the client level (in serveral browsers as well as in many firewall content filters, ever wondered what 'safe search' on google does?). The main reason it hasn't picked up is because porn sites don't want to use it. They want to maximize their readership and this won't help them.
3. You can't really force people to comply to this, as that would be censorship and unconstitutional because it violates freedom of speech. Sure, most people don't have any problems with that in an idealized world, but you need to ask your self, what constitutes porn and what does not, and who has the right to dole out rattings. The last thing I would want is an MPAA for the web, and even if it was tried it would never work, because it doesn't scale. The amount of work involed to check every website is insane, not to mention all the cases that would end up in court. (for example, lets say your site was given a bad rating because some robot dumped a whole bunch of penis enlargment spam into comments in your word press weblog.

That said, PICS is not a complete failiure, and it's much better than nothing.

You have just described REST my friend.

I wish so very much that the web worked like this, but it doesn't, and for the most part won't for a long time. Personally I think HTTP is actually a decent protocol, but it still has some serious confusion involved. The biggest problem of course, are all those code monkeys who don't know what their doing.

As far as ifl is conserned it has some serious problems associated with it. Sure it would work ok for sites like slashdot and google that have a large user base, it doesn't work well for small things at all.

For example, what if I set up my own website and I start using the tag foobar. I put my resume on there at ifl:foobar/resume and I tell a potential employer they can get it there. However, during the time of my interview, someone else (lets say Jeff K.) wants to use the domain so he and all his friends start to associate his site with the foobar keyword. And my interveiwer goes to get my resume, and he finds some other kids webpage instead.

While the current DNS system isn't that great, it has integrity, which is very important in a naming/uri system (see http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html). Why is it important? Well think of all of the confusion you would have if everyone in your office traded names for a day.

personally, I would like to see the tld system dropped. I don't really see any purpose in it. There are a few tlds that have use (like .mil or .gov), but I think they would be much better of if they were dropped too. (then you just use mil.country or gov.country). Instead of slashdot.org, just use slashdot.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="INSERT_RATING_HERE" region="US">

Pwned.

Again whole XMLHTTPRequest is an example of IEs poor standards support. There is DOM Level 3 Load and Save module developed since 2000. Pretty powerful. Doesn't work in IE.

You should take your own advise and read the html 4.01 specs.

Maybe it's because there isn't supposed to be an 'align' attribute?

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/tables.html#h-11 .2.4

HTML is not a subset of SGML, nothing even remotely close, it's an SGML application, and you do need to understand SGML parsing rules to parse HTML properly.

I know very well where to find the HTML specifications, and if you actually read them (shocking idea, I know), you will find that it doesn't fully describe how to parse HTML, because the whole point of using SGML as a base is because all this stuff has already been specified decades ago. Some HTML specifications include a brief summary or tutorial about basic SGML constructs, but they are not definitive and they skip lots of things.

SGML governs parsing, HTML governs semantics. They are different specifications doing different jobs. If you want to parse HTML properly, you need to read the SGML specification, because that's the standard that covers parsing. And you need to pay for that.

For example, from the HTML 4.01 specification:

Please consult the SGML standard for information about rules governing elements (e.g., they must be properly nested, an end tag closes, back to the matching start tag, all unclosed intervening start tags with omitted end tags (section 7.5.1), etc.).

Lots of the specification is like that. Where it mentions parsing at all, it's done as a stopgap measure and refers you to the SGML standard.

Ah but since HTML is only part of SGML, and doesn't require a full SGML parser, the specs a only a subset. If you want to read the HTML Specs, head on over to W3C.

The problem is, it implies changing the relationship with text, there is not a single text that is written and delivered to the reader, but some set of texts. In some sense, this is the same change that is brought with real style-sheets, not one page layout, but some indications on how to lay-out the text. I doubt the average writer is ready for this changed of structure, so I doubt it would actually work: how many news site even use simple meta-tags like acronym?

• Photoshop: The GIMP - how many times does this need to be said, the interface is slightly different but the gimp has most of the features of photoshop plus a few of its own.
  Why don't I do the rest of the main Adobe stuff while I'm at it:
  
  • Pagemaker: Scribus
  • Illustrator: Inkscape
  
  
• Games: Cedega - but maybe you'd be better off using a console (not as in bash you blockhead) as they're cheap and while piracy for them is a bit harder its doable if you're commited.
• Autocad: a quick search reveals two commercial solutions LinuxCAD and VariCAD and a guide to getting AutoDesk's Autocad running under wine
• Dreamweaver: NVU, Amaya, hell even fckEditor or, if you're hardcore then vi(e)macs.

he is actively helping people to distribute child pornography

For your next act you should rant about how Tim Berners-Lee is actually in league with the phishers and scam artists who run websites on the internet. Or how Bram Cohen is personally sharing every song, book, game, and movie ever created, all at the same time.

You can't use it to *find* content; you can use it to block content selectively. Well, actually, a web search engine could index the PICS ratings of the content it comes accross and make them searchable.

As for your specific needs, I suggest you read Rating Services and Rating Systems. An example rating system is given here, and the appendices contain example descriptions of the RSAC and SafeSurf rating systems.

Unfortunatly you can not use PICS to protect you from Goatse images; this is because the people who want to show you such images have no reason to rate their pages accuratly.

You can't use it to *find* content; you can use it to block content selectively. Well, actually, a web search engine could index the PICS ratings of the content it comes accross and make them searchable.

As for your specific needs, I suggest you read Rating Services and Rating Systems. An example rating system is given here, and the appendices contain example descriptions of the RSAC and SafeSurf rating systems.

Unfortunatly you can not use PICS to protect you from Goatse images; this is because the people who want to show you such images have no reason to rate their pages accuratly.

Having a separate .xxx domain name gives us nothing that PICS doesn't already give us, in a superior and more fine-grained way.

I'd guess TBL.