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?
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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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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(){}'
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.
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.
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
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.
Kind of like ROT13 is used in traditional newsreaders? I *like* it. It isn't marking it as "nsfw" (whatever that means), it is merely something that the poster has decided (rightly or wrongly) that some people might not want to see without specifically flipping a switch/menu/preference option to do so (and a properly designed browser could be set on "always show" or "never show", as desired). It prevents casual viewing.
Your suggestion makes much more sense than a "nsfw" tag, because the poster isn't stuck with the impossible situation of trying to judge whether or not something is safe for everybody else's workplaces, and it is more broadly useful (e.g., spoilers).
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
Because 99% of the time, there's a perfectly good attribute that already exists for the purpose. In this case, it's class. No extension to HTML is necessary.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
Nice troll though. Looks like you snagged a few moderators.
Too bad they don't have a "Not Safe For Moderation" tag.
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?
<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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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.
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.
Ugh, fine, replace bold with a LI. LI can legally have P as a child, so a generic close tag followed only by a open LI and open P tag could refer to either. since an LI does not have to be closed (explicitly or implicitly) before P opens. You have a P nested in an LI and you ask to close something, the browser doesn't know without future context. You've changed the task of the parser to require look ahead rather than knowing what it is doing based on parsing done so far, and the parser has to evaluate things more carefully in the context of the HTML nesting rules. Add to that there may be cases I can't readily produce where a reasonable guess about which tag is being closed is impossible (in the LI, P case, if the close tag had anything other than LI, it would have to be a close P tag I think, since UL/OL can't have anything but LI nested underneath, and a new LI or close UL/OL would mean both closed regardless of which explicitly closed). The short of it is, HTML dictated closing tags that match opening tags, and HTML has never been explicitly designed since to handle the concept of generic closing, and some concepts exist that would break.
When I say do not require closing, it is clear I mean does not require explicit closing. implicit closing is a given.
Anyway, if anything, the examples show how much more complicated an HTML parser has to be to evaluate generic close tags.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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!
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.
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.
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/
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.