Adding Content Label To Pages

In this small article, we would see in brief regarding adding content rating to our webpages thus facilitating Content Filter tools to easily identify the content of material in our webpages.

Introduction

Internet is a mixed resource and hence we have so many content filtering tools, proxy servers, firewalls etc. to allow only information and data that are friendly to us and useful to us. Almost all of these firewall and filters have content filtering engine, which prevents any harmful and anti-netiquete information like spam, adult content etc., from getting downloaded to our browsers. While most of the times, content filtering software is available and is activated only in Firewalls/Proxy Servers, a very simple content filtering system is already available with our favorite webbrowser, Microsoft Internet Explorer, itself.

This engine called Content Advisor is available in Tools -> Internet Options -> Content

from Microsoft Internet Explorer menu. The first time, you activate, it would ask you to create a Supervisor Password and then on, it starts filtering the webpages you browse, till you disable the advisor.

PICS Labelling

According to Visual Studio MSDN documentation, PICS stands for Platform for Internet Content Selection. I think by filling out a simple form at http://www.rsac.org/, you can get a simple PICS label that you can append to your website, that you have registered with RSAC. The process of adding the PICS label to the webpages is quite straight-forward. A simple META tag would carry the label provided by RSAC needs to be carried by your webpages.

After the PICS rating has been added, the site is viewed differently from those having no labels. Now the content filtering software (like Content Advisor of MSIE) start checking this and if the system settings allow this type of site to be viewed, then our page would be permitted to be displayed on the client browser. The advantage is that pages without the PICS label, might not get a privilege to be displayed, with stricter system settings. Even with reference to MSIE Content Advisor, the site might also be checked, with respect to domain names too. And hence for a different subdomain, access might be disallowed and an optional 'Enter Supervisor Password' Prompt might appear.

Adding a PICS label

A sample PICS META Tag goes like this:

<meta http-equiv="pics-label" 
    content='(pics-1.1 "http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html" l
gen true for "http://www.mydomain.tld" r (cz 1 lz 1 nz 1 oz 1 vz 1)
"http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l
gen true for "http://www.mydomain.tld" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))'>

Ideally the value within 'Content' must go as one line. Fortunately, ASP.NET provides an easy method to add PICS label to our website. Just call

Response.Pics(picslabelstring)

This automatically adds Pics Label to our website.

Conclusion

I hope the following article would have been much useful to global web development fraternity. Though there is'nt much code/snippet for this idea to provide as download, the links and other information should be useful in providing a website/application, that is more friendly to Content-Filtering Software and of course, the global Internet fraternity, to whom the website/web application is ultimately intended for.

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

About the Author

Vasudevan Deepak Kumar

Web Developer

India

Member

Vasudevan Deepak Kumar is from Chennai, India who has been in the programming career since 1994, when he was 15 years old. He has his Bachelors of Engineering (in Computer Science and Engineering) from Vellore Engineering College (now VIT University). He also has a MBA in Systems from Alagappa University, Karaikudi, India.

He started his programming career with GWBasic and then in his college was involved in developing programs in Fortran, Cobol, C++. He has been developing in Microsoft technologies like ASP, SQLServer 2000. For sometime, he has also been with PHP and MySQL based development in one of his previous organizations. Now currently his focus is on Microsoft .NET World (ASP.NET, C# and Whidbey)

In his past-time, he listens to polite Carnatic Music.

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ASP

suman_sunil

4:24 5 Feb '04

Hi, i have a variable in ASP which stores a string(which is actually the source code of an .xml file) i need to read this variable and create a well formated .html file and display it on the web page... please help.
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There are better ways...

Heath Stewart

2:49 30 Jan '03

This is marked as advanced why? This is mere child's play that's been around for about 5 years. Besides, you didn't even discuss where the tag is supposed to go. If you just do Response.Write() anywhere in your page, it won't work. It has to be in the header. Honestly, there are better ways. Even if you use Response.Write(), you'd still have to do it to every page and save yourself little work besides centralizing th PICS meta tag, which you also didn't mention. The content attribute also doesn't need to be on one line. The browser normalizes the document. Except under pre-formatting conditions, all lines are trimmed and each line-return becomes a single space for content.

A better way is to add an HTTP header using IIS to all out-going files using the Internet Information Services snapin. Notice how the META is an HTTP-EQUIV? That means it's normally found in the HTTP headers. So, go to your IIS manager, right-click on your Web site and select properties. Select the HTTP Headers tab, click Add inside Custom HTTP Headers and use "pics-label" for the name and the rest of the appropriate string for the value. Click OK a bunch of times to save the changes. Now the string is in one place (making it easy to change) and is added to all content - not just HTML pages but pictures, too! You can also use the content ratings section in those property pages, but the details of it are not well-known so you'll have to experiment for yourself.

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