What to do with now deprecated PICS labels

[weegillis]

Others like me probably have thousands of static pages with PICS labels, ICRA SiteLabels and such from the past decade. We are now faced with the same problem: What do we do with them? Do we replace them, remove them or just leave them alone. Is their a direct replacement for PICS; RDF perhaps?

And what of RDF, et al labels; who is generating them now that ICRA is no more? Seems FOIS has dropped the site label standard all together. In the past, webmasters sort of partnered up with ICRA and the likes, but FOIS does not appear to have any interest in webmasters, only giant corporate partners.

Does this mean we no longer need to label our sites; or does it simply mean that there is a void, at present, and webmasters are left to their own devices?

[Clint1]

I'm glad you mentioned this. Now I'm going to have to remove all those images/links at the bottom of all my pages.

[weegillis]

For now, I'm still linking to icra.org from one page. FOIS has a page there with information and links. The ICRA badge that I created years ago to the 80x15 'standard' will remain just as an indication to visitors that there is a site label. Even if PICS is deprecated, it is still supported, so my reasoning is that there is no need to remove it, just 'replace' it with a newer standard, which I'm hoping to learn in this thread.

[Clint1]

(Are images here such as yours that are "attached" supposed to be clickable?)

I have images similar to that, but the problem is when people click them the ICRA pages no longer exist. I guess I could make them no longer clickable, remove the link.

[weegillis]

In the early (PICS) days, the link pointed to icra.org/about/; then along came the RDF label and the link pointed to icra.org/sitelabel/. Now the only link that works is to icra.org, which is where FOIS has the page noted above.

If we have to go to the trouble of editing pages to remove the link, we may as well remove the image, too, as it doesn't further anything to display a badge to an organization that no longer exists. I don't want to remove the meta data, though, until we know what to replace it with.

[Clint1]

In the early (PICS) days, the link pointed to icra.org/about/; then along came the RDF label and the link pointed to icra.org/sitelabel/. Now the only link that works is to icra.org, which is where FOIS has the page noted above.

That's what mine point to, the latter, icra.org/cgi-bin/rdf-tester/sitelabel.cgi.

If we have to go to the trouble of editing pages to remove the link, we may as well remove the image, too, as it doesn't further anything to display a badge to an organization that no longer exists. I don't want to remove the meta data, though, until we know what to replace it with.

But of what use is the meta tag is the site/service is no longer around?

I also use another PICS label, http://www.safesurf.com/inspect/ and its meta tag points to http://www.classify.org/safesurf/ .

[weegillis]

As I understand it, even while the label generator is no longer available, the ICRA PICS and RDF labels are still functional, which would include their URL meta data. Until a replacement comes along, it can't hurt to leave them in place.

No point linking to ICRA, though, except the page here, http://www.icra.org/, the one with the FOIS message.

[Clint1]

As I understand it, even while the label generator is no longer available, the ICRA PICS and RDF labels are still functional, which would include their URL meta data. Until a replacement comes along, it can't hurt to leave them in place.

But what I don't understand is just how are they "still functional" if the service is gone?

[weegillis]

Found this link going out of a site that I must have put in about 18 months ago. Completely forgot about this one:

FOSI: http://www.fosi.org/icra/

Still not a lot of answers, but there are more details.

The site in question is still displaying the label put up in 2004, which has to be way out of date

<meta http-equiv="PICS-Label"
 content='(pics-1.1 "http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html"
 comment "ICRAonline EN v2.0"
 l gen true for "http://www.example.com" r (nz 1 vz 1 lz 1 oz 1 cz 1)
 gen true for "http://example.com" r (nz 1 vz 1 lz 1 oz 1 cz 1) "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html"
 l gen true for "http://www.example.com" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0)
 gen true for "http://example.com" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))' />

Seems I dropped the ball and should have been asking this question a long time ago, when I first encountered this old tag and discovered that ICRA had changed hands. Busy, busy, busy... This question got sidelined.

On another site we have the following, slightly newer labels

<link rel="meta" href="http://example.com/labels.xml"
 type="application/rdf+xml" title="ICRA labels" />
<meta http-equiv="pics-Label"
 content='(pics-1.1 "http://www.icra.org/pics/vocabularyv03/"
 l gen true for "http://example.com" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0 oa 0 ob 0 oc 0 od 0 oe 0 of 0 og 0 oh 0 c 0)
 gen true for "http://www.example.com" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0 oa 0 ob 0 oc 0 od 0 oe 0 of 0 og 0 oh 0 c 0))' />

What can be said of the RDF/XML label? Is this what we should be using? Is there still a site that will generate them, or do we have to construct it ourselves?

XML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<rdf:RDF
  xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
  xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
  xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
  xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
  xmlns:label="http://www.w3.org/2004/12/q/contentlabel#"
  xmlns:icra="http://www.icra.org/rdfs/vocabularyv03#">

  <rdf:Description rdf:about="">
    <dc:creator rdf:resource="http://www.icra.org" />
    <dcterms:issued>2007-1-27</dcterms:issued>
    <label:authorityFor>http://www.icra.org/rdfs/vocabularyv03#</label:authorityFor>
  </rdf:Description>

  <label:Ruleset>
    <label:hasHostRestrictions>
      <label:Hosts>
        <label:hostRestriction>example.com</label:hostRestriction>
      </label:Hosts>
    </label:hasHostRestrictions>
    <label:hasDefaultLabel rdf:resource="#label_1" />
  </label:Ruleset>

  <label:ContentLabel rdf:ID="label_1">
    <rdfs:comment>Label for all/most of website</rdfs:comment>
    <icra:nz>1</icra:nz>
    <icra:sz>1</icra:sz>
    <icra:vz>1</icra:vz>
    <icra:lz>1</icra:lz>
    <icra:oz>1</icra:oz>
    <icra:cz>1</icra:cz>
    <rdfs:label>No nudity; No sexual material; No violence; No potentially offensive language; No potentially harmful activities; No user-generated content; </rdfs:label>
  </label:ContentLabel>

</rdf:RDF>

I notice that the above labels only point to domain, and not www. subdomain. Should they point to both (assuming they're still valid for today's web)?