The Frosty Mug Revolution

I was a little surprised by how much attention the last few posts have received over this past week. Who would have thought so many people would be interested in a standard machine-readable label for online NSFW content? The posts were featured on Digg, Slashdot, Reddit, Newsvine, Yayhooray!, and a number of other high-traffic tech-oriented sites.

There’s one question that people keep asking me. They want to know how this machine-readable label might be used in practice. Well, here are some examples that readily come to mind:

1. Community-driven sites could easily employ server-side scripting to add the appropriate attribute and value automatically to either a div or an anchor whenever a user reports a post, comment, or link to be NSFW. Many sites, including Yayhooray!, already use such functionality to achieve the same basic effect. They would just need to make sure their syntax matches the new standard.
2. Site owners could provide an alternate CSS stylesheet as a site function. Visitors would then be able to easily select “Hide NSFW Content” and have that preference persist through use of cookies.
3. Browser developers could create a preference to hide or show content labelled with an NSFW attribute value.

You also might be interested to know that over the last week I’ve been corresponding with a number of interesting and potentially influential people interested in helping out with the promotion of the spec as a standard. If there’s anyone else out there interested, don’t hesitate to contact me.