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PICS Current Status

PICS has been superseded by the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER). W3C encourages authors and implementors to refer to POWDER (or its successor) rather than PICS when developing systems to describe Web content or agents to act on those descriptions. A brief document outlining the advantages offered by POWDER compared with PICS is available separately.

This page summarizes the relationships among specifications, whether they are finished standards or drafts. Below, each title links to the most recent version of a document.

Completed Work

W3C Recommendations have been reviewed by W3C Members, by software developers, and by other W3C groups and interested parties, and are endorsed by the Director as Web Standards. Learn more about the W3C Recommendation Track.

Group Notes are not standards and do not have the same level of W3C endorsement.

Standards

2009-11-24

PICS 1.1 Label Distribution -- Label Syntax and Communication Protocols

PICS has been superseded by POWDER . Developers and other interested parties are referred to the POWDER document suite, in particular the Primer and POWDER: Description Resources.
2009-11-24

PICS 1.1 Rating Services and Rating Systems -- and Their Machine Readable Descriptions

PICS has been superseded by POWDER . Like PICS, POWDER encodes descriptions that can be applied to single resources or defined groups. Unlike PICS, the descriptions themselves are encoded in RDF . Developers of ratings services are advised to encode their descriptive vocabularies in RDF, taking note of Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies.
2009-11-24

PICSRules 1.1 Specification

PICS has been superseded by POWDER . Developers of applications for which the inferencing capability inherent within POWDER and POWDER-S are are insufficient or inappropriate are advised to explore the Rule Interchange Format.
2009-11-24

PICS Signed Labels (DSig) 1.0 Specification

PICS has been superseded by POWDER . POWDER documents, which are encoded in XML, may be signed using XML Signature Syntax and Processing.

Obsolete Specifications

These specifications have either been superseded by others, or have been abandoned. They remain available for archival purposes, but are not intended to be used.

Retired

1997-06-10

Digital Signature Label Architecture

The vision set out in this document was superseded by the development of the Semantic Web.