What is this pics-label tag doing?

Question

(I'm going through an extremely basic website right now and trying to make it standards-compliant, although I'm pretty new to HTML. I know this is a nubish question, but as I've been Googling for it, the only links I see are ones that will not let me see the forest for the trees. I do not have time to spend two to three weeks going through irrelevant and low-level documentation to get one simple question answered that should be much easier to find simple, beginner-level charts and the like for.)

Take this code:

<meta http-equiv="pics-label" content='(pics-1.1
"http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html" l
gen true for "<domain>" r (nz 1 vz 1 lz 1 oz 1 cz 1)
gen true for "<domain>" r (nz 1 vz 1 lz 1 oz 1 cz 1)
gen true for "<domain>" r (nz 1 vz 1 lz 1 oz 1 cz 1)
gen true for "<domain>" r (nz 1 vz 1 lz 1 oz 1 cz 1))'>

Is this just saying, in an obsolete-but-still-used way, "Hey, my images are family-friendly, and no warning flags are necessary"? Or is there something I should do to change it towards that end?

Why is the same text copied four times in a row (originally there were four images, by the way), and does this tag need to be changed if another domain is ever set to forward to this one?

Answer 1

(You probably know this, but for all readers: PICS has been superseded by POWDER.)

What you got there:

• pics-1.1 gives the version number of the PICS specification.

• http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html is the service identifier (which is a unique identifier for the chosen rating service).

• l is a shorthand for labels.

• gen true for "…" means that the following label can be applied to any URL that starts with <domain> (i.e., the URL is used as a prefix, similar to robots.txt’s Disallow).

• r is a shorthand for ratings, which gets followed by a parenthesized list of categories and values.

So your PICS meta element contains 4 general labels, where each label is an ICRA rating. Why 4? Probably because the site URL design requires it (but maybe those general labels were used here unnecessarily).

I have no idea what this rating is actually saying, as the ICRA labeling engine has been discontinued.