- From: Brian Behlendorf <brian@organic.com>
- Date: Mon, 19 Jun 1995 14:39:58 -0700 (PDT)
- To: Martijn Koster <m.koster@nexor.co.uk>
- Cc: Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb@nsb.fv.com>, rating@junction.net, www-talk@www10.w3.org, uri@bunyip.com
On Mon, 19 Jun 1995, Martijn Koster wrote: > I think the KidCode solution is technically the wrong way to do it, > because it changes the nature of a URL, which from the Web's > conception has been nothing more than a location, to include an access > policy. > > I'd strongly urge this group to consider a resource's location and > access policy as seperate bits of information. I strongly agree. I've been thinking a lot about the situation, and it seems to me that a simple solution would be to combine a filtering application with an existing HTTP (or other protocol) proxy server. This "filtering application" would consist of an access control list of either good URL regexps (thus allowing only URLs which match the regexp) or bad URL regexps (only disallowing passage of particular URLs). These lists could be created by any number of administration levels - by the teacher at a classroom level, by a group of teachers at the school district level, by the Department of Education or the PTA, or even commercially by third parties. The filters could be combined as well, and updated using HTTP transaction. I really don't believe this is a huge technological problem - I think one could take the CERN or TIS proxy and with 4 engineer-months create a filtering application. I've outlined many of these thoughts in a short paper at http://www.organic.com/Staff/brian/community-filters.html It doesn't specify anything enough to be an RFC, but I would be happy to work with people who'd like to come up with the syntax and protocols for these ACL's and the inter-ACL transactions. Please read this document before responding to this post, there are some delicate issues I address more fully there. One thing my paper doesn't discuss, which Nathaniel's RFC focuses on, is self-evaluation by content providers. I find that a very difficult situation, since any system like that implies enforcement by some agency... To accomplish the same thing I might be in favor of a new HTTP header as Martijn is, but I think Keywords: could also be used. We looked at doing this as a software development project, but the product liability issues are absolutely enourmous, so we're concentrating on other things. We would be willing to help support a public-domain development effort, a la Apache and VRML. Brian --=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-- brian@organic.com brian@hyperreal.com http://www.[hyperreal,organic].com/
Received on Monday, 19 June 1995 17:41:50 UTC