Baking censorship into the spec
June 12th, 2009 | by Joe |There is a proposal to introduce a new <nsfw> element into the HTML5 spec. The idea is to flag potentially censorable content that might get you fired or otherwise offend your fair-hearted co-workers, I suppose.
I am uncomfortable with the idea of baking in a self-censorship construct, or any kind of censorship construct, into a specification. This is poor semantics – semantic structure should define the meaning of the content and not try to impose some moral or ethical absolute. I just don’t see how this would be implemented effectively, and better to call objects what they are in my opinion. But most importantly, I don’t want to see us creep in censorship constructs into the very foundation of the web. There is something fundamental about this proposal that I find troubling.
(discovered from Zeldman)
