Memoirs from the old web: IE's crazy content rating system

Other articles in this series:

The evolution of the web, and a eulogy for XHTML2

The Demise of the Mildly Dynamic Website

Memoirs from the old web: The GateKeeper access control system

Memoirs from the old web: server-side image maps

Memoirs from the old web: The KEYGEN element

Memoirs from the old web: IE's crazy content rating system

Memoirs from the old web: IE's crazy content rating system

Today, Internet Explorer has been consigned to the dustbin of history, yet its<br>quirks and peculiar features remain an interesting area of discussion from a<br>historical perspective. There was one particular feature of IE which not only<br>now seems comically naive, but also completely impractical: namely, IE tried to<br>pioneer a system of content rating.

This was essentially a standardised “parental controls” system. The idea was<br>that a webpage could be rated in terms of the profanity, nudity, sex, violence,<br>etc. that it contained.

Alright, hands up: how many people remember this dialog in IE's Internet Options?

For the curious, that “More info” would take you to this this broken link.

RSACi stands for “Recreational Software Advisory Council — Internet”, the RSAC<br>being an organisation which existed to come up with a system of classification<br>of various kinds of content. The RSACi v1 vocabulary, which is shown in the<br>above dialog, allowed a web page to add a special element to indicate<br>how its content should be classified on four different axes:

RSACi AxisLevelDescription (in Internet Options)<br>LanguageLevel 0Inoffensive slang. Inoffensive slang; no profanity.<br>Level 1Mild expletives. Mild expletives or mild terms for body functions.<br>Level 2Moderate expletives. Expletives; non-sexual anatomical references.<br>Level 3Obscene gestures. Strong, vulgar language; obscene gestures. Use of epithets.<br>Level 4Explicit or crude language. Extreme hate speech or crude language. Explicit sexual references.<br>NudityLevel 0None. No nudity.<br>Level 1Revealing attire. Revealing attire.<br>Level 2Partial nudity. Partial nudity.<br>Level 3Frontal nudity. Frontal nudity.<br>Level 4Provocative frontal nudity. Provocative display of frontal nudity.<br>SexLevel 0None. No sexual activity portrayed. Romance.<br>Level 1Passionate kissing. Passionate kissing.<br>Level 2Clothed sexual touching. Clothed sexual touching.<br>Level 3Non-explicit sexual touching. Non-explicit sexual touching.<br>Level 4Explicit sexual activity. Explicit sexual activity.<br>ViolenceLevel 0No violence. No aggressive violence; no natural or accidental violence.<br>Level 1Fighting. Creatures injured or killed; damage to realistic objects.<br>Level 2Killing. Humans or creatures injured or killed. Rewards injuring non-threatening creatures..<br>Level 3Killing with blood and gore. Humans injured or killed.<br>Level 4Wanton and gratuitous violence. Wanton and gratuitous violence.

The RSACi v1 Classification Scheme

IE's support for this scheme allowed you to configure a maximum level for each<br>of these RSACi criteria, and then secure these settings against being changed<br>by setting a special supervisor password.

The idea, in other words, is that websites would conscientiously add this<br>metadata to each page so that IE could determine whether the user should be<br>allowed to access it; IE allowed you to configure a maximum level for each of<br>these RSACi criteria,and then secure these settings against being changed by<br>setting a special supervisor password. Of course where this idea falls down is<br>that basically no websites actually did this. You could choose to enable the<br>“Users can see sites that have no rating” option, making the mechanism largely<br>ineffective because so few sites actually included the rating metadata, or<br>disable it (the default), making almost all of the web inaccessible; although<br>you could also explicitly whitelist or blacklist specific websites:

The “Find Rating Systems” button would take you here.

Standards. Interestingly, this scheme wasn't some IE proprietary extension.<br>It was actually the product of a W3C standards effort, Platform for Internet<br>Content Selection (PICS). This was an abortive<br>effort at a web standard for adding content ratings metadata to web pages. Other browsers could<br>have implemented it, though I am unsure if any actually did.

However, the rabbit hole actually goes even deeper than I previously knew. You<br>see, the PICS standard doesn't just define support for one particular ratings<br>scheme (RSACi). Oh, no. Instead, the PICS standard defines an entire DSL for<br>defining custom ratings schemes. Not only can arbitrarily many ratings vocabularies exist, but<br>a web page can add metadata classifying itself according to as many of them as it wishes.<br>In fact, a website could even invent its own content ratings scheme in the PICS language and<br>then classify itself using that scheme.

...Did I mention this DSL uses S-expressions?1

((PICS-version 1.0)<br>(rating-system "http://www.rsac.org/Ratings/Description/")<br>(rating-service...