Administering an ISP Installation

Rating Content with PICS

Ratings were designed to help parents and teachers control what children could gain access to on the Internet. With IIS 5.0, you can apply Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) ratings to your site. PICS associates labels (metadata) with Internet content, by applying a custom HTTP header to the requested documents. By default, the assigned rating will apply for one year, but it can be customized to apply for any length of time.

The following example illustrates the HTTP custom header information, including a PICS rating. IIS 5.0 will append this information to all of the designated documents requested from the site.

CLIENT REQUEST
GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 2000)
Host: reskit.microsoft.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cookie: HTMLA=FONTSIZE=SMALL; ASPSESSIONIDQGQGQGPQ=ADHNMFMDOCNECFKLJGGNMBBL

SERVER RESPONSE
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
PICS-Label: (PICS-1.0 "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l by "someone@microsoft.com" on "1997.10.17T12:35-0400" exp "1998.10.17T12:00-0400" r 
(v 0 s 0 n 0 l 1))
Content-Location: http://domain.com/Default.htm
Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 16:36:16 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Tue, 14 Oct 1997 22:55:26 GMT
ETag: "50f59e42f4d8bc1:cd7"
Content-Length: 288