PICS Ratings

A machine readable age rating in the head, from the era when the web thought labels would save it.

In 2026: Dead. PICS was the W3C's answer to the Communications Decency Act: sites rated themselves, parents set Internet Explorer's Content Advisor to enforce the labels, and almost nobody did either. The meta below is inert everywhere now, Content Advisor itself disappeared in the Windows 8 era, and the W3C formally superseded PICS with POWDER in 2009, which nobody used either.

Where it came from: W3C Platform for Internet Content Selection, 1996, with ratings from RSACi. Written in the shadow of the Communications Decency Act; superseded by POWDER in 2009.
W3C PICS ↗Wikipedia ↗

<meta http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html"
  l gen true comment "RSACi North America Server"
  for "http://www.example.com" on "1997.06.30T14:21-0500"
  r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))'>

<p style="font:13px Verdana">n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0: no nudity, no sex, no violence, no
foul language, sworn by the site about itself. No browser reads the label any
more, and the ratings bureau it points at dissolved decades ago.</p>