Re: Last Call: <draft-nottingham-safe-hint-05.txt> (The "safe" HTTP Preference) to Proposed Standard

[Yoav Nir <ynir.ietf@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Nov 16, 2014, at 9:35 PM, John Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Sites can easily adapt their services to the needs and desires of their users. They
can do it today using site specific settings. I am pretty sure that these settings
require more than just one bit, ...

Here's a concrete suggestion: the Bing search engine and IE browser
support this safe flag right now.  Could you talk to the people
responsible for them and ask whether they considered more fine grained
schemes such as PICS, and why they implemented a single bit instead?

Or, I can go to their website and see that their “bit" implements ternary logic:

And what’s more, their website is much more specific about what is and isn’t “safe”. For them, it’s all about “adult” content, while the draft explicitly reveals that it does *not* mean “child at keyboard”.

In some places websites advocating blasphemy would be considered unsafe, meaning that you could get in trouble for reading them, but bing doesn’t care about that. That’s fine, and pretty much all of the examples of websites that have safe flags mean the same thing by “safe”. So why not state that in the draft?  Why not call it “porn” or the much more common euphemism, “adult”?