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How To Label Your Pages With PICS Meta Tag

So I wanted to label my multimedia page as containing images and sounds not appropriate for children. This was more difficult than I expected. First off, there are a number of ratings systems which you can use. I am not sure why the powers-that-be have not settled on one standard, but so be it. Luckily, you can encode your page with multiple ratings at the same time.

Tag Format

The PICS tag is a meta field that goes into the header of HTML pages like the following sample.

<head>
<meta http-equiv="pics-label" content='(PICS-1.1 entries)' />
<title> Your Page Title Goes Here <title>
</head>

The entries in the above tag are in the following format. You have have any number of them one after another.

"URL-of-ratings-standard" labels
  for "your-URL"
  generic true
  ratings (scores)

The URL-of-ratings-standard should be in quotes "" and is the location of the ratings standard you are using. Here is a list of the standards and their associated URLs.

Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html
Safesurf http://www.classify.org/safesurf/
Safe For Kids http://www.weburbia.com/safe/ratings.htm

The for "your-URL" and generic true sections are optional and allow you to define ratings for your entire site at the root page on your site. For instance, if you have a page of adult pictures on your site foo.com, you would say:

"URL-of-ratings-standard" labels
  for "http://foo.com/adultpictures/"
  generic true
  ratings (scores)

The scores depend on the rating system being used. Please see the following pages for details on each of the systems.

Meta PICS Tag Example

So when I finally got done, my pages contained the following rating labels:

<meta http-equiv="pics-label" content='(PICS-1.1
  "http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html" labels
     for "http://mm.256stuff.com/"
     generic true
     ratings (cz 1 la 1 lb 1 lc 1 nz 1 oz 1 vz 1)
  "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" labels
     for "http://mm.256stuff.com/"
     generic true
     ratings (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 4)
  "http://www.classify.org/safesurf/" labels
     for "http://mm.256stuff.com/"
     generic true
     ratings (SS~~000 4 SS~~001 9 SS~~009 3)
  "http://www.weburbia.com/safe/ratings.htm" labels
     for "http://mm.256stuff.com/"
     generic true
     ratings (s 1)
)'
 />

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