RE: RSAC stupidity

> At 01:58p -0500 02/01/00, rev-bob@gotc.com wrote:
> >Still, grit your teeth and run through the process once.  At each 
> >question, view the associated definitions and copy 'em off to your 
> >hard drive.  When you finally get the META tag, check out the 
> >embedded URL - as I recall, that points to a concise copy of the 
> >rating levels.  Combine that with the definitions of the shorthand 
> >terms ("what constitutes "strong" vs. "vulgar" language?"), and you 
> >can plug in your own ratings with a little practice.
> 
> Thanks, Bob -- you recall correctly, and now I have saved it all to 
> disk. I also determined that the true/false in the rating is whether 
> it's for a branch or a single page. Now I can go write a meta 
> generator program for MacOS. :-)

Not quite accurate, but close enough.  (Look closely, and you'll see it's "gen true" vs. "gen 
false" - gen meaning generic, intended to cover a spread of pages as in a directory or an 
entire site.)

As for a "meta generator", I use the following logic with htp, a neat little HTML preprocessor 
that I'm sure I've plugged in here before.  There's not a compiled Mac version out, but the 
source code is freely available at http://ww.crl.com/~jnelson/htp/ if you're up for it.  I'm sure 
Jim would like to see a MacOS edition of the program; he's got *NIX and Windows editions 
already....

<def name="pics" option="gen nr sr vr lr">
<if not nr><set nr=0 sr=0 vr=0 lr=0></if>
<meta http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l 
gen ${gen} comment "RSACi North America Server" by "${rbemail}" on 
"2000.01.01T12:00-500" r (n ${nr} s ${sr} v ${vr} l ${lr}))'>
</def>
<def name="ratings" option="nr sr vr lr">
<pics gen="false" nr=${nr} sr=${sr} vr=${vr} lr=${lr}>
<pics gen="true" nr=0 sr=0 vr=0 lr=4>
</def>

(Note that "rbemail" is a constant with my email address as its value.)  With those defs in 
place in my htp.def file, I can rate a page by popping this metatag into the page header:

<ratings nr=0 sr=0 vr=0 lr=0>

When that gets processed, it's translated to the proper syntax:

<meta http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l 
gen false comment "RSACi North America Server" by "rev-bob@gotc.com" on 
"2000.01.01T12:00-500" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))'>
<meta http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l 
gen true comment "RSACi North America Server" by "rev-bob@gotc.com" on 
"2000.01.01T12:00-500" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 4))'>

Granted, you could probably add some sort of tweak to read the actual time instead of 
setting it to noon on 1/1/2000 EST, but that's more gravy than anything else.  In fact, if you 
look, my pages are all set to a rating time sometime in 1997.  ;)



 Rev. Robert L. Hood  | http://rev-bob.gotc.com/
  Get Off The Cross!  | http://www.gotc.com/

Received on Tuesday, 1 February 2000 23:22:48 UTC