Slashdot Mirror
The NSFW HTML Attribute
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.'"
It sounds like a good idea to me, like the spolier tags you get on forums and stuff.
Do you reallt think the goatse trolls will bother using these tags if they're going to decrease their chances of getting people to follow the links?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
... help us search more easily for objectionable material?
The guys at goatse.cx will be the ones willingly NOT including the NTSF tag in their design, because they want you to see the goatse when in front of your boss.
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.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Anyone else think "evil bit" when they first read this?
Powerful technologies which can be part of a "censorship pack" are always presented as harmless components. Then when that piece is accepted, the other one slides by.
"Not clicking on a goatse link when the boss is standing behind you... " ???
Any graduate from Newblet doesn't click *anything* when their boss is nearby.
What would a HACKED variant of this technology be capable of?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
...where's the foot icon?
Who in their right mind would want to exclude the office clowns from their website, other than the people who don't post objectionable material in the first place?
a lot of porn content creators probably wouldn't care if you're at work or not.
If someone depends on the nsfw tag to protect them and then goes wading into the porn/pirate/gambling underworld at a public terminal they're likely in for a suprise.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
<tr><td width="150"><center>oooo
<marquee width="100%"behavior="alternate" direction="left">
3=========Ð</marquee> O</center></td>
<td width="40">
<marquee width="100%" behavior="scroll" direction="right">~ ~ ~</marquee>
</td></tr></table>
...from the oft-proposed, yet always shot-down, "XXX" TLD? Although I support the idea of a "NSFW" tag, as I support the XXX TLD concept, I expect failure for the exact same reasons.
I do not get this. Would this really work? This relies on the people making links to use the NSFW tag or the guys making content to use it. Frankly, I don't see it ever being used properly.
On a side note, if one wants to add to the html tag collection, how about a universal close tag for the last opened tag, </>. Just so we don't have to type </b> </a> </img> </i>, etc. so much.
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
If you're going to a NSFW site without knowing it's NSFW, the chances are 99%+ you're getting suckered. And the person suckering you will easily find millions of such URLs missing the tag. Or is this about blocking? Because I imagine getting yourself *into* block lists should be easy as hell.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
We fire employees by examining their visited site history later with monitoring software.
Then , managers visit what looks objectionable or possibly disallowed.
At the employees exit interview, we show them why their being terminated against company policy
What they saw live isn't a factor .
What we see as to where they went is what matters.
this tag won't stop us from terminating employees
The intent is everything , saying they didn't see it of no matter
NSFW doesn't really have a concrete meaning. What's safe in one workplace may not be safe in another.
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
The "NSFW" thing has always been a courtesy on the part of the poster, and in those cases it works because you can read the warning about the link before clicking.
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?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
nsbb: Not Safe Before Breakfast
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
Why doesn't /. just disable links to goatse.cx in posts? I guess they fear alienating the all-important juvenile jerk-off bloc.
Insert witty sig here.
Remember back when there were no ratings for video games? The pro-ratings argument said that going to a voluntary system would prevent mandatory censorship by the government, that it would just make it easier for the customer to choose appropriate titles, nothing more.
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.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
NTSFPWTSMAM - Not Safe For People With The Same Morals As Me
... bzzt .. %$#$&%#$%$# .. (head explodes)
While not RTFA this tag seems to be all about setting a level of moral standards in order to protect people from "Objectional" material. And thats my objection. It's such a huge generalisation that anything I would want to be protected from is the same as what other people would want to be protected from. But in using the proposed tag it is the website that is setting what everyone is supposed to think is "bad".
As an extreme, what would the people who produced goatse.cx or tubgirl think if they are at work and saw that their own sites were marked as NTSFW??
Its not safe for work
But *I* made it at work
You shouldn't look at it at work, its not safe to do
But it's *my* work
Its not
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Move over tag - we have a new winner.
For a site like slashdot, the solution would be to serve all comments in a big <div rel="nsfw">. That way, content that has been controlled by an editor gets through, but the uncontrolled content is blocked. Finer-grained controls would just extend the link tags by that attribute.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
The rel attribute is designed to specify a forward relationship with the current document. Google broke that when they proposed 'nofollow' (a nice idea that does not appear to have solved the spam problem except for Google's spidering of blogs). Further, you can't add it to images and paragraphs and everything else this guy is envisioning. The rel attribute is only applicable to a and link tags, and to use it otherwise deviates from the XHTML spec.
It's just some additional semantic information. It shouldn't replace warnings (due to not knowing which clients will support it), but it could supplement them.
As for subjectivity, well, all content creators make subjective judgments in their HTML markup. In practice, we accept the variability of the choices.
my boss _is_ the goatse guy =(
his needs a sitewide solution, too - "nofollow" has robots.txt, so why not have nsfw.txt?
Or for some sites, just:
Could be useful.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
You gotta be fucking kidding me.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
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.
And user CSS definitions?
This is GOOD in a few ways.
.xxx domain as we'll police ourselves.
.xxx TLD. :(
* No need for the
* A content rich site like fark (www.fark.com) can serve questionable content both to users and nsfw-users.
The drawbacks tho do exist.
* Proxys will still eat the questionable keywords.
* Kids can uncheck the box
Some sites have SFW content while having NSFW banners. Uncool!!!
I still want the
It is a bad idea to codify an official way to designate a particular online expression as objectionable. Similar to the .XXX top-level domain, having such an attribute will only lead to so-called moral police passing laws mandating the use of such tags. And then same material will automatically be filtered at the ISP level for libraries, schools, and, as our government becomes more and more like China's (while China's is slowly becoming more and more like ours used to be), the home. Do you really want the government deciding what is "not safe for work" on your computer screen?
instead of NSFW, create a SFW tag, and configure your browser to display only that which has it.
"God its a barren featureless wasteland out there..." - Lt. the Honorable George Colhurst St. Barleigh, looking at the wrong side of a map...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
I'm not sure that using the "rel" attribute would be ideal, but I understand that this was likely being suggested in light of the fact that passing standards through the W3C would take way too long, and waiting for the adoption of the standard in browsers would be even worse. Ideally, they would establish some sort of "rating" attribute that could be applied similarly, as this could be a little more robust by defining (using fixed values like media types) "maturity levels" (rather than ages, since this can vary internationally). Even so, there's no practical way to enforce the use of such an attribute; it's tough enough to get people to even consider standards and best practices.
I'd like an "obfuscated" tag, which the browser only displayed if the user specifically asks them to. This could then be used to wrap spoilers, NSFW material and anything else that users might might want a choice over whether they want to see.
My Journal
I bet reading the WCWD one caused a particular image to flash into your mind. Who needs to post a link to an actual image when this durdenesque technique works so well?
For crying out loud people, stop modding everyone up who says, "But mean people won't use the tag and you'll be fooled! It's a failure!" It isn't *meant* for malicious or even apathetic posters, it's mean for the people who today voluntarily tell you that a link they're posting is NSFW out of common courtesy.
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.
Is it april already ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Much of the content I see on the web would be better tagged with a 'WTF' tag.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
To quote Apocalipsys Now "We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write 'fuck' on their airplanes because it's obscene!". On USA sex is more tabbo.
Other people are more openminded, and dont suffer from that tabbo.
Adding this idea to internet is bad, because cultural centric extensions to standards are doomed, because the world is wide and complex. I dont think is a good idea to open this can of worms. Because next you will have the suggestion.
<p>obscene text here </p rel="spanish insiquistion">
-Woof woof woof!
As much as you like to think you're Arnold fucking Schwarzenegger, you aren't "terminating" anyone. You're firing them, or terminating their employment at best.
I'd also like to know how exactly you ensure that the site they visited the first time around contains exactly the same content as it does when your "managers" review it. We wouldn't want you to wrongfully fire -sorry- "terminate" someone because some one just posted boobies on a blog they viewed a couple of weeks ago.
For that matter, how can you say that the "intent" is everything then go on to say that the tag won't work? The whole point of the tag is to keep people from downloading content they don't "intend" to see when they follow a hyperlink or visit a website or something.
In the spirit of helping those of us at work to avoid inappropriate websites, thank you kindly for linking to goatse on the front page!
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Why not use PICS/ICRA stuff? It's already built into internet explorer and proxy products. Now, PICS is meta data on the page level, but wouldn't a page with several blocks missing just be confusing? If you need block level meta data, perhaps you should just include RDF tags, with the proper namespace, in your XHTML. Whichever route you choose, you still need browser makers to go along with it.
We fire employees by examining their visited site history later with monitoring software.
Then , managers visit what looks objectionable or possibly disallowed.
Sounds productive to me, carry on!
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
This sort of thing is why HTML has a meta tag. Rather than proposing extensions to HTML every time an idea like this comes up, why not include meta attributes as well, so metadata can be associated with specific markup rather than an entire page?
Since sure those IE guys should have to wait for IE8 for had this, then the only safe option to surf the web at the office will be Firefox!
Is that someone clicks on it when their boss is standing behind them. It's meant to be embarassing. I don't really get what this will solve. It's not like pr0n sites will use it.
Besides the much populised but low occurence incidents of people getting fired for reading an article with a cussword in it or some such, the kind of sites someone generally gets fired for browsing are exactly the sites that won't use this.
I'm waiting for the first BHO that interecepts every webpage you view and inserts the the NSFW tag between between tags or /body> (format can vary with syle). .xxx toplevel domain was a better idea.
I think the
maybe you should ask yourself if it's worth living in fear rather than finding a more ethical work enviroment.
Personally, I became so tired of bs & tyranny, I quit my job and became a contractor. IMPE, corporations breed abuse.
Hey now that's an idea opressive governments might be interested in. Maybe a rel="NSFC(hinese)" or something similar and then they can stop spending so much on censorship. Brilliant!
-JWR
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
There have been a lot of posts that rightly point out that the definition of acceptable varies from workplace to workplace. Where these statements go awry is with the assumption that the NSFW tag would therefore automatically fail, however. The reason why there is so much variance from place to place isn't because every single workplace has thought it out carefully and diligently and has determined that their own needs are special; this isn't true at all. Every company in the U.S., for example, faces the same degree of legal risk when it comes to inappropriate sexual content (since EEOC laws are federal, not state or local). The same holds true for nearly every other kind of risk that results from NSFW content, and let's face it...that's the real business driver behind disallowing such things in the workplace.
So why is there so much variance? Simple. There are no standards that are put out there for everyone to draw upon. The creation of an NSFW tag creates an opportunity...the chance to build a standard behind it. Remember, we don't have to build a standard for workplace behavior, or the way communications are handled within an organization. All we have to do is say, "Ah, yes, that's probably going to get someone into a lawsuit that they'll lose," based upon existing case law and regulations.
What about other countries, then? Well, there are two ways to look at it. One, since this is Google, there can be variance based upon the country in question. When I was in China, I got www.google.cn; when I was in the Philippines, I got pushed to www.google.ph. It's not that hard to differentiate based on country, with that kind of situation. And if you decide to go with "one tag fits all," then you could simply adopt the standards of the U.S. Why? Because we're damned litigious, that's why...if it's safe here, it's pretty much safe anywhere else.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
A not-safe-for-work warning, like a spoiler warning in a film review, should be visible in the page and implemented the same way. CSS makes clear that the separation of markup and content is a good thing, and a tag that has a moral meaning rather than a practical meaning goes completely against that.
Not-safe-for-work is a subjective value judgement, if it was going to work at all as a tag it would need much finer granularity than just on or off, for instance and it would have to be implemented not directly in the page code, but as a service that takes its rating from a third-party trusted reviewer, and there are already "net safe" services that do that.
We combine this with the 'evil bit' identifying bad packets and the net will be safe for corporate America!
Of course I am being sarcastic. As other posters pointed there are many problems with this. Not the least being what constitutes 'not safe'.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Hello slippery slope, pleased to meetcha.
Please submit a single example of a government mandated HTML tag. HTML is always opt in/opt out. You think the porn sites are going to jump on the NSFW tag?
Nice troll though. Looks like you snagged a few moderators.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
So I've been working on web/feed crawlers for the past year. We thought that we'd just use the nofollow flag to prune the crawl space down. It's a standard right?
BZZT! Turns out MAYBE 5% of all the sites we crawl have ANY use of the nofollow flag (let alone correct use of it). Blogger doesn't even use it. So the nsfw idea is nice. But doomed.
The whole semantic web idea is doomed w/o tools that force people to add the semantics to the content. And people (as a whole) just don't have any reason to make the effort. Human nature trumps geek desire at every turn.
Nice troll though. Looks like you snagged a few moderators.
Too bad they don't have a "Not Safe For Moderation" tag.
It is about making us all less likely to accidentally click on a goatse.cx link when our boss is standing behind us.
But that is what goatse.cx is best for...
reminds me of the evil bit.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt
Your managers having nothing better to do than watch what sites the employees are visiting? That's one fucked up company you work at there.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I suspect people "accidently" find pr0n for the same reasons they "accidentally" get virus infected, i.e. running around clicking every link in sight. Personally I don't believe I have ever gotten to a NSFW site accidentally, nor have I ever received pr0n in email that I didn't ask for. People claim "oh I don't know how I got there" because they're made to feel guilty about sex and continue to lie because (at work), are afraid of being caught. Write down the address or email it to yourself so you can see it at home, DOH!
I agree with it being "a bad idea to officially designate a particular online expression as objection" but i still think that there's room for a tag of some sort... I think the idea is right but the implementation is wrong. I think it would be more prudent to flag content as safe for work instead of not safe for work. a SFW tag could easily be integrated into ultra-legitimate sites such as news sites, business sites, and most other standard internet sites, thereby allowing browsers to filter all but flagged content in the workplace. I think that this is a better approach because it's mostly the people who WANT to read the safe-for-work content and not the nsfw stuff, therefor, make them change as there's no way (that maintains openness and online freedoms) to make people tag their content any which way to be "compliant" with any modern convention (or any convention at all). doing it that way, also leaves blogs and personal sites in the "gray" unprotected area whereby content is MOSTLY safe for work but the content creators don't want to (and shouldn't have to) limit themselves to purely safe for work content. I think it's better to have a wider "gray space" of unknown content (and a large number of business and family oriented sites supporting the "i'm safe for work" tag) than force people who MAY have objectionable content to tag their pages as such and become instantly blacklisted by automated software.
May the coffee god Smile upon you!
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.
And if it gains momentum, various providers and blocking services will start requiring it, and content providers will have to implement it if they want to reach a wider audience; and voila, it's about censorship! Remember how the MPAA ratings system is completely voluntary and "not about censorship" either?
sic transit gloria mundi
Shouldn't HTML just describe the layout of the page rather than classify its content?
Why am I not able to tag content as "Out of Site", so as to show that the code in this block is not written by me and could possibly be considered unsafe?
You shouldn't be surfing around where you could stumble upon content NSFW when you are at work anyways, why dedicate an entire attribute to you leisure-surfing nerds? Cool idea, but a bit narrow I'd think.
This naturally wouldn't be a universal solution - but I see where it would be useful. For example, say a blog like BoingBoing. They sometimes post NSFW or vaguely NSFW stuff. I'd appreciate it if they had some way of flagging this so I could filter these posts out at work.
Naturally it wouldn't protect everyone from everything, but it would be a great tool in situations like this where there's a reasonable consensus on what's going to be tagged and why. It's a way for an author to share a greater variety of things while allowing the user to pick which things they want to see now. I think it'd be a great little "mini-standard".
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Fallacy #1: it's obvious that this wouldn't be universally used. It wouldn't be used by anyone malicious. Or, it would be used maliciously to confuse stuff, tagging all the stuff that's OK to see as NSFW and the not-OK stuff remains untagged.
So, that leaves us to assuming each website will decide to use it or not use it. And this really applies only to sites where all content is just internally created, not externally. So, BoingBoing could use it (no reader comments) but not Slashdot (reader comments: see Fallacy #1).
Now... How many sites truly mix NSFW material with safe-for-work material? From the sites I visit, most are either clearly on one side or the other, especially when it comes to content generated by the site's owners. I'm sure we could come up with dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of exceptions. But that amounts to a miniscule amount of all sites.
And for the most part, those sites already have those filters made, internally. One example is YTMND: if the content is deemed NSFW by users, the domain of the particular entry turns into YTMNSFW.com. YouTube has this too. Some content is "blocked" and you need to sign in to see it. Or Google Image Search. So, Fallacy #2: the redudancy becomes redundant. That's Fallacy #2.
Fallacy #3: NSFW doesn't mean the same to all people. A picture of Madonna and Britney Spears kissing might be appropriate (or encouraged) in some work places, wink-wink-OK in others, or not appropriate at all. Same goes for a mother breastfeeding a child or pictures of a violent crime scene. Then you've got stuff that's completely safe at home or at a library but some workplaces may not want: non-pay poker sites, online gaming, sports sites, etc. So unless there's going to be a lot of different NSFW tags it's kind of useless.
The idea of it is a good one. But it can be done already and it's in use. If a website really wants to have something like it, there's easier ways to accomplish that than invent a NSFW tag and wait around for browsers to implement it.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
There are instances where elements can be nested not in the order they are opened. For example, having an underlined and bolded sequence intersect would be such a case:
<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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Exactly what part of the United States government being run by religious fundamentalists do you not understand?
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?
Where does it stop? Why only NSFW and nothign more?
You want a solution? Put [NSFW] in your link text, and possibly explain it in the TITLE="" attribute of the link. So people can see it right there. I mean, why would you want anything else?
I do not know how diverse the idea what is "safe for work" is within the US, but we here outside the US think that people should know what they click on and bosses should be able to communicate what sort of browsing behavior is not wanted, and for what reason.
Bad enough how stuff similar to this is used to stop children and parents from thinking. Now an utterly idiotic attempt to stop employees from thinking.
Apart from this, who really believes that somebody who wants to lure to goatse will honestly label the link?
This all sounds like a April 1st post to me.
How is this useful if the client has already received the objectionable data?
How many people are browsing sites that have potentially NSFW content with a boss standing over their shoulder? I'm guessing not many.
The problem with NSFW content is the big brother problem. How many corporate gateways are monitoring traffic?
If the content is still being sent to your computer and passing through the corporate gateway, big brother is still going to assume you are looking at it on company time and utilizing company resources. No matter how many client blocks you have in place.
If you find yourself at risk of mistakenly following a goatse.cx link at work, you're already debatably off task.
I can also see this creating a snowball effect of content rating. Sure; we'd start with NSFW and SFW, but like a previous post mentioned, what is safe for work in some instances is not safe in others. This could rapidly become a gangly beast of keywords assigning metadata to content, which would not be fun for web developers.
Like any good web technology, the only way it will work is large-scale adoption. IMHO, if this WAS standardized and 25% of websites with NSFW content adopted it, that would be pretty damn impressive. It doesn't help you, the off-task employee, with the other 75% though.
In terms of ad revenue, sites that depend on impressions or ad clicks would never mark content as NSFW; their ads would never be viewed.
Good idea though.
I don't think he's suggesting -- or that his suggestion requires, anyway -- that you eliminate the tag-specific close tags in favor of a universal one; you could easily have both. Most people would probably use the universal one, unless they really needed to close tags out of order, in which case they could use the traditional tag-specific closers.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Your comment is nswc.
And possibly wcwd given the sexual ambiguity of ACs.
There is no reason to introduce a new value for the rel attribute. The class attribute would suffice perfectly. Thus:
/>
.nsfw
.nsfw:before
<a href="example.com/xxx.jpg" class="nsfw">Check this out!</a>
<img src="example.com/xxx.jpg" class="nsfw"
The blocking is already possible with user-defined stylesheets (although there would need to be widespread support for the class among people who post nsfw content, obviously):
{
display: none;
}
a.nsfw
{
display: inline;
}
{
display: inline;
content: "NSFW Content ";
}
What's goatse.cx?
REL describes the relationship to another web page or other internet resource. For example, if the related resource is the home page for the web site
Does that mean they're pushing to standardize a "hack" (oh I can put a string inhere, I could filter on that!) or implementing new functionality or expanding sollutions brought out in the past (like content filtering or meta tags)?
It would make much more sense, imho, to add field where you can add flag ANYTHING how you want, in a meta kindof fashion. So you can flag your content as you desire, and users are able to check or uncheck types of content to display or hide.
...")
Say you could go in your browser and check some customizable and some standard rulessets that consist of allowing or blocking certain flags. ("Workspace: block nsfw,block xxx,block porn,block community,block chat,block naked,
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
How about one for "not safe for children". This could be used for all content that people would think children should not see. Then all these filters at the library and other places that filter content could block that content, instead of entire sites based on a word or words. This would prevent sites that have medical info from being blocked because of their use of certain words, but could be used to make porno companies more responsible about the content.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
How do I nominate this to be made into an official April Fool's Day RFC for 2007?
First, why a tag? Come on, this is the semantic web. If you're going to do that, make it a div-like thing: , sort of like
No need to overload existing tags out there...
The other thing is that software will be written to tell management that so-and-so viewed "questionable" content, and management will reply: Can't we get our websense to block the nsfw (tag or attr) and thus people will use it for other purposes, such as content they want corporate users to pay for? (Enter you credit-card-enabled-account number here and we'll remove the nsfw premium content blocking "feature").
Blech...
"Piter, too, is dead."
See US Code Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 110, $2257, Record keeping requirements.
Basically, if you don't link (or embed) information of who is and how to contact the custodian of records, you risk 5 years hard time.
There are already multiple rating systems for Internet content, including both server-supplied and third party supplied, and you can configure your browser to utilize them to keep yourself from accidentally accessing "bad" content. In fact, many companies implement the NSFW relation through content filtering anyway. It's unclear why we need this markup in addition to all that.
A legal precedent that opens you to civil liability is your big example? Farting in public opens you to civil liability in this country. Hell, breathing in public opens you to civil liability in this country. It has nothing to do with the law, only with the right for one private citizen to sue another private citizen.
Some random whack job senator may very well try to lobby for something like this, but I don't see it ever happening for the following reasons:
1) Impossible to enforce on pages, due to global nature of internet.
2) Impossible to clearly define content to be tagged, due to fuzzy definition of obscenity.
3) Impossible to enforce software compliance, due to open source and extra territorial software vendors.
You're a troll. An AC first post whose entire argument is a fallacy, responding to an article talking about a guy who's working on a way to not accidentally get porn at work, with a hysterical barely on-topic diatribe against hypothetical government censorship.
And last time I checked, the fundies got schooled in the last election. Not that the goddamn Dems won't jump on the "OMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN" bandwagon, but it's still not gonna happen.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I'll call bullshit on that one...Having to have, on your porn site, a link telling the federal investigators who to contact to procure the legally mandated age records of your "models" isn't at all, or in any way, a legally mandated HTML tag.
The same information would have to be available on any printed publication or movie.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Doing it this way in HTML won't serve the needs and interests of users well. What is really needed is an optional, client-side change in how HTML is handled that automatically processes links against a customizable set of content ratings (perhaps using separate advisory ratings hosted by hosts of the target content, or linked or embedded into the document providing the link, as one source of ratings, but also capable of accessing a user-selected set of third-party remote rating sources and locally-maintained user ratings potentially overriding remote ratings) and modifying the appearance of links or statusbar descriptions based on those ratings.
If you are going to try to provide this kind of information, using a single NSFW marker provided by the provider of the link is a way-too-limited way of doing things to be of much use.
It's an interesting suggestion, but you have to download an entire HTML-XHTML page before the entities can be interpreted, so even if your browser won't display nsfw content, you will still have transferred it and any software tracking your downloads will catch you looking at stuff, even if you didn't see it; the data would definitely find its way onto the proxy server, unless the proxy server honored the nsfw tag and didn't cache these. An "nsfw" attribute on an [a href="" rel="nsfw"] would be the only way to screen your content before you pull it - there could be a firefox plugin that turns these links red, or puts a stop sign next to them, er something.
It's one thing for your boss to see you with a dirty web page, another for them to have a record of you going to it. This solution does nothing for the latter.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
XHTML is obtuse and annoying enough as it is, the last thing it needs is to start adding content-specific tags. Why not add tags, so that employers can customize browsers to keep employees from following email links to lame blog articles? Or maybe a tag, so that MBAs can be limited to only viewing stuff that's potentially work related?
What XHTML needs it to be made less obtuse and more friendly for new designers. If the W3C is foolish enough to clutter it's standards by adding tags like , it will only encourage design firms to standardize their web design on Flash.
add to userContent.css:
*[rel="nsfw"]{display:none;}
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
It's not just a "jump on the bandwagon" thing. It's also good for the average user who, when he posts to a forum to be able to add this attribute to the A tag. It means that he can put something in the forum, tag it as such, and allow the individuals to make their own choices.
This is also about personal responsibility... both that of the poster and that of the reader.
Parents could even use this attribute to configure the browsers their kids use, because if it is not work-safe, it is also almost 100% likely that parents will not want their children to read/see it.
OCO is Loco
Talk about totally missing out on the already existing adult content rating standards.
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 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 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...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Is the problem that people don't realize that they are about to click on a link to porn? ("Uh, honey, I was just searching for snow blowers and this page must have loaded by mistake ... honest!") Is the problem that people just click on any links they see, without first having a reason to follow the link, like maybe the context of the page and the text of the link?
They probably won't, because many already support functional standards like ICRA tagging.
Here's for example the tags of the adult site Abby Winters:
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
while the 'boss' is standing behind us is something one should do regularly. Last time I checked my IT friends pretty much feel this way and maybe the truth behold the sucky bosses of the world need more education on how the 'droids' feel about micro management.
I think the bigger problem is morals and work ethic.
Should you really be clicking on risky links at work, rather than... say... working?
I know sometimes I surf while I wait for my scopes and machines to aquiess (sp?), but if people are going to be clicking links or reading websites while they are otherwise supposed to be working, you shouldn't have a 'nsfw' element to make that surfing any easier.
No wonder $588 billion was lost to workplace distractions this year...
PICS was a great idea, but it trusts the site owner to honestly rate his own content. That's not going to happen when there is financial (or other) incentive not to.
What we need is a similar standardized way for decentralized third parties to rate sites. Not a central third party, like a ratings board. Not a kludgish way, like this nsfw tag. A generalized standard like PICS that can be used to create multiple rating systems, applied by any joe making a link, which can then be picked up by Google and "averaged" a la PageRank. How well it works is then up to how diligent people are at supplying this microcontent.
Then you deal with the problem of link spammers putting tons of incorrect microcontent in their links. But Google seems to do a fairly good job of weeding through the tons of bad macrocontent currently used to give false impressions, so I assume those guys will find a solution.
Alternatively, your browser could look up third-party ratings which are maintained at a centralized location. Think del.icio.us, but with everyone using a standard set of tags to rate sites on various attributes. You still have to deal with the same problem of bot accounts created just to give false ratings though.
Constitutionally Correct
I agree with you, that this is great for writers & readers of sites that already mark their content as not safe for work.
However, I haven't seen anyone point out this problem, which lends itself to other complaints slashdotters have had: Currently, some page writers put "NSFW" next to objectionable links. If NSFW moves to an HTML relationship value, then you won't have a visual cue that the author marks stuff as NSFW or not.
Even if the browser alerts you when you mouse-over an objectionable link, when you mouse-over a non-NSFW link, you won't see a cue to tell you if it's safe or if the author failed to mark it as NSFW. If you're at work and worried about these things, then you'll have to do the same as you do now: judge based on the rep of the site and such, and assume that any unmarked link might lead to racy content.
If you're forced to make that assumption, perhaps you should make it official. Make an HTML relationship value "ISFW" (Is Safe For Work). Then readers can assume that unmarked links are dangerous, that marked links are safe according to the author. The browser can report that the link is marked safe (say, through the pointer icon or through a tooltip).
Just a proposal, but I think it's important to point out that an absence of NSFW tags doesn't tell you if they've been used or not. You lose the visual info that you occasionally get now.
Another issue which hasn't really been touched on, is that right or wrong, you're relying on proprietary browsers to support it. Take Internet Explorer's continued refusal to correctly support the more vital w3 recommendations and specifications such as CSS. What chance is there that Microsoft will get round to implementing this if it was to become a standard? And Safari for that matter, I doubt Apple would take the time to implement this functionality through a patch, you'd probably have to wait for a major revision in an OS upgrade, and if you miss the boat for one of those it's another year before you get around to seeing it. Only the likes of Firefox and other open source browsers like Konqueror have a chance of implementing this definitively, because it would be easy to submit code patches and/or fork them. Of course, that's assuming that they would see the value in the functionality and be willing to implement them...
This attribute is too generic, it's going to lead to people wondering, "Well, why is this Not Safe For Work ?"
I propose adding a range of attributes.
1) rel="goatse"
2) rel="midget porn"
3) rel="donkey show"
That way, not only do I know that it's not safe for work, but I can forget about sending a bookmark to my personal email address for when I get home, unless it's midget porn, in which case I'll make an exception.
Using theese non-generic attributes would also be good for the employer during christmas time.
Rather than giving generic bonus checks, they could monitor each employees NSFW toggling & personalize each employees bonus.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
What's safe for work varies across the world.
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.
The person who decides if something is SFW should be the web reader, not the author, because what's safe for me may not be safe for you.
The web author should determine the nature of the content. For example class="grotesque", class="sexually", or rel="hateful". Of course a tag can have multiple classes. If something like this is promoted i hope it's in concert with movie, tv, music, and game rating systems.
One problem with using class is that that you are turning a generic words with user defined meaning into a reserved words whose scope is understood by all web browsers.
XHTML should really have something better for rating content. The PICS[1] project looks promising.
[1] http://www.w3.org/PICS/
I don't think mandating it is a good idea, but I do think it is nice to have. There is nothing with wrong with giving people a tool to be responsible as a net citizen. Yes, you are still going to have the putz that still won't use it even if provided. I think you are doing people a tremendous favor by adding two whole tags to your page. I know adults that use parental controls on sites they visit because they don't want to hit porn or whatever. I know people that take life a little more seriously than I do, and have a hard time with such things. If the tag existed it would be wildly adopted immediately because right now objectionable content is effecting site hits. Imagine if you could go to your favorite joke site at work and not worry that something not safe would come up. Imagine how many ad hits these sites are gonna get if they put that ability in their page. 'Nuff said. Hits motivate everything for web sites.
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
...Will no doubt include it in the specifications, wait 3 years till everyone is using it then depriciate it and force people to use a CSS equilivant.
Wow. You sound angry. I am going to have to point out that saying this:
...with a straight face requires some highly-evolved muscle control. You speak of fallacy but do not even read the case law you claim is moot. In MPAA v. 2600, the court actually issued a preliminary injunction requiring the website to remove the offending HTML tags. This was a court order issued by the government requiring action be taken under the law. If the legal order had not been followed (under the law), a criminal contempt citation may have been issued (as it is, 2600 complied). You are not really proposing that a civil lawsuit has nothing to do with the law?
.XXX TLD is a bad idea for the same reason. To respond to your "impossible" reasons, point by point:
It has nothing to do with the law, only with the right for one private citizen to sue another private citizen.
I am happy you do not see it ever happening because you believe it is impossible it will happen (that seems to be the gist of your argument). I see it as being the likely outcome and so agree with those who believe the
1) Impossible to enforce on pages, due to global nature of internet.
1) When has it being impossible to enforce on the internet prevented bad law from being written?
2) Impossible to clearly define content to be tagged, due to fuzzy definition of obscenity.
2) Simple. The government uses the community standards test. See United States v. Thomas. I do not agree with this ruling by any means, but the government already has a solution to your problem.
3) Impossible to enforce software compliance, due to open source and extra territorial software vendors.
3) What does software compliance have to do with HTML authors being required by law to include the NSFW tag on inappropriate content? Oh, you mean web browsers and such respecting the tag. Not necessary. The content can and will by government mandate be filtered before it ever reaches your home or place of business.
So here we are again. The topic is the proposed NSFW attribute. Continuing to go off-topic by calling me a troll (or alleging my response post was a first post) does not increase the chance I will respond to your next post, if at all, in a civilized and respectful manner. Please stop it.
Regarding video games, is there any place in the US that's
1) Within a one-hour drive of a Wal-Mart but...
2) Amazon.com won't deliver to?
I'm genuinely curious. When I can't find something local (which is quite often), and I can't drive out a bit further to get it, I try to get someone to ship it to me.
My Blog: http://nic.dreamhost.com/
I think you're going about this backwards. The approach is fundamentally flawed because you are offloading the decision making about the content to the author. But the author can't know whether some particular content is safe for _your_ work, or whatever your context may be. Instead, we need a way for an author to encode metadata about the content in their page or their entire page as a whole that the browser can combine with user preferences to make a nsfw determination. Now the problem with this approach is that it relies on the author to care about letting their users avoid content and even if they did there's all this legacy net content. So this is where a social solution can really help. With a relatively simple addon and an nsfw server. Users can tag a page/link/div/etc as porn, or even give content an MPAA-type rating. A few users would of course be ginea pigs. But as they encounter the content, they tag it and the addon aware browser can add all the metadata to the page that we were originally counting on the author to provide. Then CSS can take over to hide/style the content appropriately. As with any social solution, you have to have controls and reviews to ensure that the users are not being malicious...
My sig has a broken link in it.
You're citing PEER, a liberal front group with biased, anti-Bush reporting?
Just a random idea, Google already seems committed to protecting users from objectionable content with their SafeSearch technology. It wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea for them to support the tag in order to further protect users. In return, porn sites willingly adding the nsfw tag could have their PageRank bumped up a fraction.
Yeah. All addresses that don't receive monthly credit card bills.
If you don't have a credit card, you can't order online. Unless you are willing to give random retailers/PayPal free and unfettered access to your checking account.
This is not only a bad idea, it's a bad FUCKING idea.
Imagine your various internet censoring applications, like WebSense for instance. why guve them any extra help? Why let your employer count how many NSFW tags are in the content you look at.
Maybe people should restrict their web browsing at work to sites that won't get them fired, I.E. work related...
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
No. Neither are people who post goatse links. Which means that the first time that Joe Senators little 5-year-old son shows his father the funny pic he finds, Joe will think: "There ought to be a law to keep children from seein these things!". And if Joe then happens to heard of this tag...
In any case, this is just the newest incarnation of the Evil Bit, and suffers from the same problem as the previous ones: the people who post non-worksafe content where you are likely to run into it while at work are doing it deliberately, and certainly won't do anything that would help you avoid it.
But something being obviously flawed by design to the point of being idiotic never stopped anyone from implementing it anyway, especially not politicians.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The problem becomes defining SFW and NSFW.
You can't define it that easily (especially where work is involved.. most places I've been at the only rule has been 'if anyone objects then it'll be removed' - so windows desktops featuring large breasted women are commonplace).
In other places NSFW might be someone saying 'fuck' on a web page.
In still others it may be going to the website of an 'unfriendly' country.
Work-wise it's far better for the company to define the policy and enforce it in the proxy.
Why not just have "safe for work" and "safe for taliban" flags with the option to sue the hell out of anyone who puts up a goatse like page or has "naughty words" in a page with one of those tags. Maybe even use digital signatures for "certified" sites. Then children's computers, school computers and "religious" freaks computers can be set up to only allow marked pages to be viewed. Then real adults don't have to worry about being harassed because stupid crap.
Those blacklists are idiotic. Expecting webmasters to register every site which may have anything which may be considered "offensive" by nut jobs is unbelievably stupid. Especially since these whackos will claim all sorts of silly things as offensive. Even just sites about science or other religious beliefs, all the while saying bigoted things about people of other religions or those who don't believe any specific religion at all. Yet they are the ones who say they are persecuted.
Just leave them in their own honeynet, and everyone will be happy.
the following tags : and more......
Would anyone with half a brain click on a goatse link at work without knowing what they'd get? Just like you don't open any old email attachment, you don't click on any old link people send you!
-Rich
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Having a NSFW tag is a bad idea. The best way to accomplish this is to never surf at work if it isn't part of your job. Never! Never! Resist the temptation to click on that browser to see what's new on Slashdot and forget about peeking to see the latest video on YouTube.
If you do this, the next time your PHB is looking over your shoulder you can turn to him or her and say, "I'm almost done with X and then we start work on Y."
Well, no. I've actually paid Amazon with coins via a local Coinstar kiosk. They also take Money Orders, which you can get from either Wal-Mart itself or the USPS for fairly cheap (USPS site says $0.95 each up to $500.00). So, even if you don't have any relationship at all with any financial institution and mostly deal with cash, it doesn't stop you from ordering something from Amazon.
My Blog: http://nic.dreamhost.com/
It is not a 'NSFW attribute'. It's also not a 'NSFW tag'. It's a new value: 'nsfw', to be put inside an attribute: 'rel', which is contained within the tag 'a'.
Here's a little nomenclature update.
+- X -+
+- A -+ +B-+
<a href="..." rel="nsfw">...</a>
-| | | | | | |
-1 2 3 2 3 4 1
X: tag and contents
A: opening tag, where attributes and tag name are specified
B: closing tag
1: tag name
2: attribute name
3: attribute value
4: tag contents
This boils down to the following: "a href" is not a tag (and neither is "img src"); "a" is the tag, and "href" is the name of the commonly used attribute specified on the tag. In "rel='nsfw'", "rel" is the name of the attribute, and "nsfw" is the value of that attribute. It still disturbs me how even some self-appointed "HTML teachers" talk about "'a href' tags".
Since most U.S. obscenity laws are local, why not break it up into regional codes?
NSF-UT.US
NSF-MO.US
NSF-OK.US
It's NSF-CA.US that I'd worry about...
And please don't ask about Amsterdam.
goodidea: stopping to smell the roses
badidea: stopping to feel the roses
So wouldn't the content still download? If it's my browser that "hides" the content of a DIV marked with NSFW wouldn't it still download the content before it sees the NSFW tag? So maybe it won't display on my screen but Proxy filters and other big brother filters will catch it being downloaded....
this is precicely why i suggested a "safe for work" tag as only businesses and "legitimate informational sites" should use it and anybody who writes a page that could be even misconstrued as nsfw shouldn't tag their page and have it "grayspace"
May the coffee god Smile upon you!
That's a nice idea. I hope you go to get some goed work on it.
t ribute.html/
Ozgur Uksal
http://diveintogreasemonkey.org/patterns/match-at