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

[Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]>]

> On 24 Oct 2014, at 11:04 am, Donald Eastlake <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 7:51 PM, Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> Donald Eastlake said:
>> 
>>> I believe it has many of the problems discussed in RFC 3675.
>> 
>> Could you please be more specific? The analogy is not obvious, and that's a big RFC.
> 
> Consider the analogy between one bit of "safeness" and one top level
> domain name for "adult" material.

RFC3675 walks through the impacts of of using a particular type of flag in a few different situations. It doesn't follow that all flags are bad in all situations; the problems listed in that draft don't necessarily apply to the safe preference, because it's designed and deployed in a way that's very different than a DNS label.

To put it another way - a common judgement in engineering is that many things are "0, 1 or many." Are you suggesting we rule out all "1" cases?

If not, please spell out the analogy, because I'm not following.

Also, I note that in 4.3 you hold up PICS labels as an exemplar;

> This sort  of technology is really the only reasonable way to make
> categorizations or labelings of material available in a diverse and
> dynamic world.

I disagree, given that PICS labels have absolutely failed to get any serious traction in the real world over the past 18+ years.

P3P did something similar (I was involved there), and similarly didn't get anywhere (except annoying some Web site operators).

Cheers,



--
Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/