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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.'"
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.
There's plenty of places where NSFW is specified in link text already. This is just a way of making it machine-readable.
Such shortcuts have already existed since HTML 2. These have been universally ignored by browser developers.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
<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. That's not valid HTML at all, and would fail the W3C's validator. The correct way to do something like that would be:
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It's been done before and is not a new idea.
PICS labels have been around since 1996, and were proposed to label for language, violence, and sexual content (among others).
ASACP RTA is another labelling scheme from 1996.
ICRA labels have been doing the same since 1999.
RTA and ICRA are in active use today. PICS fell mostly away (to my knowledge) -- probably because it wasn't just for filtering, but for any kind of content tagging. Being a general solution doesn't get the "save the children" mouth-breathers behind you.
The problem with the rel=nsfw is that it is binary. I can't establish any kind of scale for what I want to see (nudity is okay, sex acts are not), and it only filters in one dimension (I can't say that I am okay with sex, but not with violence, or vice-versa for the U.S.A.).