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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.'"
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?
:-/
Exactly. For this to work would require everyone's cooperation. I think that, if anything, the internet has proven that you are guaranteed to run into any amount of uncooperative people. What's next, a law mandating the use of this flag?
If you're at work and just clicking on random links in front of your boss, well, you deserve what you get.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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?
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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.