The Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) was a specification created by W3C that used metadata to label webpages to help parents and teachers control what children and students could access on the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...

. The W3C Protocol for Web Description Resources project integrates PICS concepts with RDF. PICS was superseded by POWDER, which itself is no longer actively developed. PICS often used a content labeling from the

Internet Content Rating Association Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) was an international non-profit organization with offices in the United States and the United Kingdom. In October 2010, the ICRA rating system, and the organization, was discontinued. Its mission was to h ...

, which has also been discontinued by the Family Online Safety Institute's board of directors. An alternative self-rating system, named Voluntary Content Rating, was devised by

Solid Oak Software Solid is one of the four fundamental states of matter (the others being liquid, gas, and plasma). The molecules in a solid are closely packed together and contain the least amount of kinetic energy. A solid is characterized by structural ...

in 2010, in response to the perceived complexity of PICS.

Internet Explorer 3 Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 (IE3) is a graphical web browser which was announced in March 1996, and was released on August 13, 1996 by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and on January 8, 1997 for Apple Mac OS (see IE for Mac). It began serious ...

was one of the early web browsers to offer support for PICS, released in 1996.

Internet Explorer 5 Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 (IE5) is a graphical web browser, the fifth version of Internet Explorer, the successor to Internet Explorer 4 and one of the main participants of the first browser war. Its distribution methods and Windows inte ...

added a feature called ''approved sites'', that allowed extra sites to be added to the list in addition to the PICS list when it was being used.New Features in Internet Explorer 5
Microsoft Knowledgebase Article Q221787

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