IE8 is on the way, but there’s one standard I want it to drop

Microsoft is claiming that the new version of Internet Explorer (IE 8.0) will be more supportive of standards. What they’re not saying is what standards they’ll support. I hope they choose to support the W3C, because as far as I’m concerned, they’re the most important standards available.

One of the standards I’d like Microsoft to dump however, is PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection). PICS was one of the very first W3C recommendations and the first to be adopted by Internet Explorer during the mid 90’s. It’s still in use today by the Content Advisor functionality (see screen shot below) to help parents protect children from inappropriate content.

PICS however, is inaccurate and it’s certainly not flexible enough to be meaningful in any way. This means that the filtering tool in IE is obsolete. It’s not Microsoft’s fault though, there hasn’t been an alternative until now.

What’s the alternative?

PICS will soon be formally replaced by a new method of classifying content called Content Labels in approximately two to four months. Before I move on and in case you haven’t read this blog before now, a Content Label put simply, is a file that contains Metadata on steroids. It’s this Metadata that would enable IE to learn more information about Web sites before presenting search results to end users.

As we’ve demonstrated with a Firefox extension in the screen shot below, IE could place a tiny icon beside each search result. This would tell users whether each Web site owner was making an assertion about the suitability of their content or not. As you can see from the screen shot, we’ve placed a red x beside search results where the Web site owners are not making an assertion of any kind.

The red x could just as easily be a question mark, or an exclamation mark. The search result with a green tick represents a Web site which has been independently verified by a trusted third party. The screen shot doesn’t display any search results with an amber tick but this could reflect Web sites that are making an assertion which hasn’t necessarily been verified by anyone.

Upon clicking on each icon the user is presented with a certificate, containing more information about the suitability of the content on that particular site. The certificate in the screen shot below isn’t particularly meaningful right now, but it could have a list of icons on the left side with a description of what each one represents to the right. Users could then select each icon to find out more about the actual assertions made by the site owner.

Based on the same Metadata, IE could build a better version of content advisor so users could filter Web sites based on more accurate and meaningful personal preferences. That’s what you call personalised search based on trust, relevance and safety.

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, Ivan Herman, Semantic Web Lead and others at the W3C, felt that the term Content Label would give the perception that we wanted to police the Internet. So, they asked that the name be changed to POWDER (Protocol for Web Description Resources). Don’t ask and I won’t confuse you any further.

I must admit, I was against their request for a name change but after delivering a few presentations, I quickly realised that some people, irrespective of how many times you say otherwise, think Content Labels is about policing the Web. So we decided to agree to the name change for the sake of keeping the peace and moving the project forward.

Whilst we refer to our method of classifying content in the W3C as POWDER, we will always refer to it as Content Labels outside of the W3C, as we find that it’s easier for our audience to relate to labels. I can’t even remember what POWDER stands for most of the time

So, in summary, POWDER and Content Labels is the same thing.

Why IE should read Content Labels to enable more trusted search results

1. Content Labels will replace PICS as a ratified standard in approximately two to four months, thereby making IE’s method of filtering obsolete as I said earlier.
2. IE can highlight Web sites that make assertions about conformance to industry standards and best practices. Type of assertions include accessibility, adult, privacy, copyright, eco-friendly, medical, marketing and more. PICS is only capable of making one type of assertion.
3. PICS and every other implementation of trust on the Web today, including SSL Certificates for security, are extremely limited in functionality. They only permit you to make an assertion about an entire domain. Content Labels on the other hand, are so flexible that it’s possible to make an assertion about an entire domain, or about specific Web pages.
4. Content Labels are based on the Semantic Web and therefore future proofing the Web for better content discovery.

How it works

Without getting into the technical detail, the browser would identify a Web site with a Content Label by locating a link tag in the header, just as it does with the title and description tags. It looks something like

< link rel=”meta” xhref=”http://www.segala.com/labels/tcuk_label_001.rdf” type=”application/rdf+xml” title=”Segala label” /

The browser then reads the contents of the Content Label by following the link above. Self labelled sites can be stored by site owners. Sites that have been independently verified reside on the trusted providers’ server.

Read more about Content Labels, the use cases and how mass adoption can be achieved.