- From: Leslie Daigle <leslie@bunyip.com>
- Date: Tue, 5 Sep 1995 10:29:01 -0400
- To: uri@bunyip.com
The real shortcoming of building any kind of "censorship/rating tags" into a document or a URL is the fact that it can only support a single rating scheme across many cultures in a given country, and many more across the _world_. For example, resources about Darwinian evolution are going to be unacceptable to Flat-Earth Society members, but are probably considered "Educational", and/or "General" to the majority of the earth's population. Or, how do you define "acceptable amounts of flesh" displayed in a picture or video? In Canadian television, there are already examples of having to change content of a single television program (that was made for both English and French Canadian audiences) because the English population considered the French version too racy. And what about other cultures that consider North-American women's dress as being far too revealing? The only thing that can be accomplished in building tags into a document or a URL is ratings for a particular population's perception of the information space. Any rating system that purports to deal with rating in a general sense will have to allow different populations to rate the same document using different criteria and tags. The Internet-Draft draft-ietf-uri-urc-req-01.txt provides one proposal of a service that could accommodate this kind of rating system, and I'm sure there are others. Cheers! Leslie. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I'm not napping, Leslie Daigle I'm redecorating my personal space." leslie@bunyip.com -- ThinkingCat Montreal, Canada ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Tuesday, 5 September 1995 10:25:13 UTC