Using PICS Rating

The Platform for Internet Content Selection, or PICS, enables users of Communicator and other Internet software to filter internet content through the use of content ratings. There are several ratings services that you can use to obtain a rating label for your channel.

To rate your site through these services, you simply visit the organization's web site and describe the type of content in your channel. You can use the following site to get your channel's PICS rating.

• SafeSurf: http://www.safesurf.com/ (click on the 'Rate Your Site' link).

• More organizations (W3C listing): http://www.w3.org/PICS/raters.

After you rate your channel content, the ratings organization will provide you with a META tag with the appropriate rating label. To use the rating label in your channel, you extract only the content= attribute and paste it into the <rating> tag.

For example, if you have received this META tag from a ratings organization:

<META http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.classify.org/safesurf/" 1 r (SS~~000 1))'>

Then, you would paste only the content= attribute into the <rating> tag, so that it would look like this:

<rating>(PICS-1.1 "http://www.classify.org/safesurf/" 1 r (SS~~000 1))</rating>

Note that My Netscape does not currently use PICS ratings, although other sites might. If you use Communicator and would like to filter the content based on PICS ratings, refer to the Netscape's Netwatch page.