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

2014-11-18 14:07:22
Part of the argument we are making (sorry if it was unclear) and that
Yoav has spent a few messages on this thread trying to get across is
that it's critical that there be a common understanding of what "safe"
means for this to be useful to parents, guardians, or other folks that
may want to interact with the internet in a "safe" manner. Each of the
sites that have implemented this have different interpretations ...

 ... which people use all the time right now.

The claim that a safe flag is unusable unless we do X, Y, and Z makes no sense. People use single bit safe flags now all over the place, and I see no evidence that anyone (outside this uniquely nerdy group) carefully scrutinizes the semantics of a site's safe flag before they turn it on.

I have a smidgin of sympathy for the argument that the flag makes it easier to profile people, but one more bit is swamped in the flood of other settings and cookies that exist now.

We're engineers, not poets. We standardize stuff that is real, not that might hypothetically exist in some unlikely to exist version of the universe.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
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