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.'"
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!
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.
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
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.
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
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
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:
Want a high quality FOSS RTS game? Try Warzone 2100!
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.
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!
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.).