How you add your ICRA PICS label to your website depends on how you construct your site as a whole. Therefore for the most appropriate advice, please select the option that best suits you from the list below:
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I am a professional/competent webmaster and am familiar with a variety of web-building techniques. |
| Please click here | |
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I use a web design tool that allows me to access the HTML source code directly if I need to. |
| Please click here | |
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I have some experience but labelling is not something I’ve done before. |
| OK, start with the basics. There’s plenty of help in the other FAQs if you need it. | |
| Please click here | |
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Just give me the basics and I’ll take it from there. |
| Please click here | |
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None of the above options sound like me, walk me through it step by step and spare me the explanations please! |
| Windows users please click here Mac users please click here |
Using a web design tool
Web design tools are there to make it easy to create a website. Most of the time you don’t need to worry about the code behind the page you’re creating. However, adding an ICRA label does involve copying and pasting your label directly into the source code.
If your web design tool allows you to add something to every page of your site automatically, please use it – ideally labels should be included on every page and it’s a lot easier if the machine does the hard work for you!
However you access it in your web design tool, get to the source code of your site. Then follow the basic instructions below.
Basic instructions
The simplest and most common aim is to label your whole site with the same label. In this case, your label will look similar to this:
This label declares that everything on the (fictitious) site at www.example.org has “none of the above” in all sections of the ICRA questionnaire. Your own label will, of course, quote your domain name and encode whatever rating is appropriate for your site. Please note: when creating a label for a whole site like this, the URL should just be the domain name of the site. The label generator will strip out strings such as /index.htm and trailing slashes at the end of your URL when you apply for a gen true label.
Copy and paste your label into the head section of all the pages on your website. That is, between the and tags in the source code. If you use a template for your pages then this should be easy.
That’s it – your site is labelled!
FAQ 1.2 Do I really have to add the label into every page?
Almost certainly yes. In order for a filter to recognise a resource as being labelled, whether it be a page or an element within a page such as an image or external script file, one of two things must be true:
- The resource carries a label for itself
- The filter already has a label in its cache memory that can be applied to the unlabelled resource.
The second condition can only be achieved by using a “gen true” label. This is explained in FAQ 1.3.
Filtering software should not look anywhere else. There is no “default location” for labels. Therefore, if a visitor to your site lands on a page without a label, it will be unable to classify it.
If you use a template for your pages, make sure you include the label in it!
FAQ 1.3 How can I control what a label covers?
By default, a label applies to the file (the page) that carries it. If a web page contained the label below in the header section of its HTML then that page alone would be labelled.
However, you usually want to include the images and other elements embedded within the page. This label won’t do that. It’s attached to the file that carries it and no other. So, you need to tell the filter “hang on to this label and apply it to some stuff that’s coming behind me.” This is achieved through the generic (gen) flag thus:
This label will be cached (held in memory) by the filter and applied to other resources that come from the example.org site. More technically, if the URI begins with the string quoted in the ‘for’ statement, the label can be applied.
Note that it is only a string and has no particular meaning. URIs at http://subdomain.example.org are NOT covered.
It is also possible to set the generic flag to false thus:
This label explicitly declares that it is to be applied only to page.htm on the example.org website.
Any label carrying a gen true flag should be cached by a filter for the online session. Filters should not hold labels in long term memory. How multiple labels for a given site are handled and prioritized is discussed in FAQ 1.4
FAQ 1.4 How do I label different sections and individual pages?
You may have any number of labels on a website. The section or page to which each label applies is specified in its ‘for’ statement. Thus you might have labels that look like this:
The label states that the specific page (message_board.html) has none of the elements in the ICRA questionnaire but it does contain moderated chat. It will not be cached so it can only appear on the page to which it relates. However, it will be given priority over any gen true labels already held in cache.
It is possible to omit all the gen true|false for “URL” elements. In this case the rating will be applied to the resource carrying it, whatever its URL. This is useful for portable documents and where labels are delivered automatically with all files through server configuration. See the professional website labelling advice for more details.
NB. Internet Explorer’s Content Advisor does not adhere to the PICS standard on this point and generally applies labels with no generic flag to any URL it comes across!
Should every label go on every page?
No. Label(s) need only be included on the page or pages to which they apply. However, no harm is done by labels appearing on pages to which they do not apply.
FAQ 1.5 How do I label a site that uses frames?
If your site uses frames, the simplest way to proceed is to put a label that covers the whole site in the page that defines the frameset. Your code might look something like this:
Website title
Since the frameset is always loaded before the pages that go into it, the site is fully labelled and you won’t need to label the individual pages.
If you label the pages, but don’t label the frameset, the site will always show as unlabelled because the first file loaded has no label.
FAQ 1.6 How do I label elements pulled from other websites such as banner ads?
It is possible to include labels for resources pulled from other domains but you will need to specify which other domains should be covered. For example, if a page at www.example.org includes an image pulled in from www.example_2.org, the label would look like this:
It’s longer, yes, but it does more!
FAQ 1.9 My site has an automatic redirect. How should I proceed?
Some personal web sites may have a nice domain name like “http://www.reallygoodname.com” which actually redirects people to an address like “http://www.bigisp/membersarea/something/~findusifyoucan”.
Ideally BOTH sites should be labelled.
If you have access to the redirect site – the one with the nice name – then you can fill in the questionnaire and get a label for it. Something like:
And put this in the head section of the default file at that site – the one that redirects visitors.
If you don’t have access to this page (and many people don’t), then you cannot label it. You will, however, be able to label your actual site.
Whether you have access to your redirect site or not, you do of course have access to your actual site. You should give “http://www.bigisp/membersarea/something/~findusifyoucan” as the URL when you fill in questionnaire, since the label applies to the site quoted within it, and by the time visitors get to your site, that’s what they’re looking at, not http://www.reallygoodname.com.
FAQ 1.10 How does filtering software read ICRA labels?
The diagram below shows how a PICS-compliant filter, such as ICRAplus, reads labels.
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Some points to note:
The term gen true is discussed in FAQ 1.3.
How a filter decides which of several available labels to apply to a given URL, i.e. what is “the most specific label available”, is discussed in FAQ 1.4.
Microsoft Internet Explorer’s Content Advisor follows a similar pattern but with two important differences:
- Whatever page is accessed, Content Advisor also checks the default file in the root directory for labels
- Labels are not cached
These differences mean that Content Advisor is not compliant with the PICS standard. Furthermore, assumptions were made during the design of its user interface that make it difficult, although not impossible, to use with the ICRA system.
FAQ 1.11 How do I “decode” an ICRA PICS label?
Within an ICRA label, the actual content rating for the site is encoded in parentheses, for example:
r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0 oa 0 ob 0 oc 0 od 0 oe 0 of 0 og 0 oh 0 c 0)
codes for “none of the above” in all the sections of the ICRA questionnaire.
To decode all the terms used the ICRA system, please consult the decoder by clicking here.
FAQ 1.12 My HTML editor has swapped “” for “<” and “>” in my label. Why and what should I do?
We sometimes hear from web authors who find that when they copy and paste their ICRA label (meta tag) directly from the web page at the end of the rating questionnaire, the HTML editor they’re using swaps the “” enclosing the tag into their HTML character references (“<” and “>” for “less than” and “greater than”).
The software assumes that you don’t know much about editing HTML directly and therefore you can’t possibly want to carry out the operation you’ve just done – well, you do! Just change the “<” back into a “”.
FAQ 1.13 Professional Website Labelling document
For the Professional Website Labelling document, click here. The document is also available in printable versions.