Comments on: Genius Grant Please, or The NSFW HTML Attribute

By: AJK

AJK — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 08:27:20 +0000

Why not just move all adult sites to a .adult domain, just as adult shops in cities are restricted in operating only in certain cities zones (well in South Africa anyway). Then a browser can warn you if you follow any link to a .adult domain. This will solve all “accidental” problems. No special hacks or coding needed.

By: philarcher

philarcher — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 12:05:54 +0000

This approach to the issue has the obvious and very attractive benefit of being simple - and simple ideas are always the good ones. However, as others have pointed out, the rel attribute is only valid on Link and A tags. There are also issues of cultural diversity and language.

A bunch of us is working on a full solution in this area covering discovery of Web resources that will work on mobile devices, are fully accessible, have some sort of trustmark or quality seal and, my own area of interest, are or are not suitable for children.

Some links: W3C Content Label Incubator Group http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/wcl/Overview.html (we're now seeking transition to the Recommendation Track)

Quatro project - making trustmarks machine readable. Includes annotated search tool and Firefox extension download option. http://www.quatro-project.org/

http://www.contentlabel.org/ - a new wiki/blog/community site dedicated to the subject. There's a Firefox extension you can download from there too.

Rest assured - we'll make it as simple as possible - but it will be compliant with HTML and other standards and cover a broad range of use cases beyond suitablility for work.

By: TC

TC — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 11:43:14 +0000

Hmm, my second post did not appear. I hope that “moderation” means just that - not “censorship”!

By: farmerbob

farmerbob — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 14:43:58 +0000

This blog ate my last post, but I've implemented a NSFW solution that places the burden on the content provider. Asking every linker to note which links are NSFW is not the only way this could work. There's a simple PoC for notifying a user that a visited site is NSFW using a META tag and GreaseMonkey at:

http://gearslips.net/deardiary/2006/12/30/nsfw-attribute-for-white-collar-slap-offs/

By: Collin

Collin — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 01:56:10 +0000

TC, it doesn't need world-wide approval - each author can decide for themselves what is NSFW.

While not a perfect solution, it's definitely a step above no attempt whatsoever, IMO :)

By: farmerbob

farmerbob — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 00:25:11 +0000

Weak as hell GreaseMonkey PoC at http://gearslips.net/deardiary.....slap-offs/.

By: TC

TC — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 14:21:31 +0000

It's an absolutely absurd idea. The web is a world wide medium. There is zero chance of gaining a world wide agreement on what is NSFW. In Saudi Arabia, for example, your swimsuit pictures probably qualify. In Los Angeles, they probably don't. A picture of naked people having sex is probably NSFW if you work in a bank, but it might be part of your actual workflow if you work in the porn industry. This idea really is completely half-baked. Maybe I'm in a time warp and it is actally April 1st?

By: Eric the .5b

Eric the .5b — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 05:03:49 +0000

This isn’t really a new attribute or idea. “rel” has existed for quite a while, and a variety of values (including “nsfw”) have been used for it.

By: Kevin Marks

Kevin Marks — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 00:06:54 +0000

This was rejected as a microformat the last two times it was proposed. If you want a publicly visible indicator, use rel-tag. if you want to categorise your pages for browser-based filtering use PICS.

By: TacticalJack

TacticalJack — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 15:29:13 +0000

Outstanding concept. May you be successful in pushing this concept forward. I personally know people that have been fired for accidental browsing “incidents”.

By: Jonex

Jonex — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 15:27:47 +0000

I think you should use a class attribute instead. It's made for this kind of things and is easily used in a stylesheet to mark/hide the content.

To show a red dashed border around any nsfw content: .nsfw { border: dashed 2px #f00}

Also suggested in the reddit thread: http://programming.reddit.com/info/wbmu/comments

By: Steven Brown

Steven Brown — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 14:39:01 +0000

(trying again with different URL) Wouldn’t you want it to use an attribute other than ‘rel’? Otherwise, you’re going to conflict with that ‘nofollow’ thing. It’d also be attribute spam to declare it valid on all HTML elements.

I’d assume the best way would be to do this via XHTML and XML namespaces where you’d have a ‘nsfw’ tag that contains whatever portion of the document you want to consider not safe for work. E.g.:

Yum!

Browsers that don’t understand the tag would do ‘Must Ignore’ and display the content. Browsers that /do/ understand that namespace (or greasemonkey scripts, etc.) could render it differently, like not display it if at work.

By: Steven Brown

Steven Brown — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 14:37:07 +0000

I have a bad feeling this blog ate my last post.

By: Grant

Grant — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 14:20:10 +0000

I failed to properly escape the HTML in my previous post. Where it says “the tag,” it’s supposed to say “the tag.” Here’s to the preview button.

By: Andrew Ducker

Andrew Ducker — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 14:19:09 +0000

I’d prefer an “obfuscate” tag, which could then be used to hide spoilers, unsafe images or anything else that users could then click to “reveal”. Heck, you could use it for quiz answers if you wanted.

By: Grant

Grant — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 14:16:53 +0000

The key technical problem with this, and likely the reason that Chris Granade’s version limited the use to the tag, is that the rel attribute only exists for the tag. Try using it for images and layers; the page won’t validate because the attribute is not in the HTML spec.

By: Jerry Kindall

Jerry Kindall — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 13:38:10 +0000

Unfortunately, paragraphs/divs within a page flagged “nsfw” will still be loaded and cached, even if you block its display, which can still be incriminating if IT investigates you for some reason.

Also, the attribute should be named something else — something that doesn’t imply quite so strongly that users will be surfing at work. There are other places you may want to block such material, and some employers may place stricter policies on Web use at work than implied by a “nsfw” tag.

Good idea though.

By: Ross

Ross — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 13:17:42 +0000

While a good idea in theory, I can see it being overused and misused as a censorship tag. I can see in several years everything from hardcore porn to an instance of the word ‘crap’ being flagged with this. While I think it is important we know what we are getting ourselves in to when clicking on a link I think censorship is ultimatly wrong especially on the internet and use of this will go some way to assisting those wishing to censor content.

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 12:54:51 +0000

rel=”nofollow” - wasn’t that a failure in combating spam?

By: Nicolas Sanguinetti

Nicolas Sanguinetti — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 11:31:32 +0000

Genius! This should become a microformat! :P