Via Zeldman I found out that a “NSFW” (“Not Safe For Work”) tag has been proposed for HTML 5. This is what the suggestion says:

One of the most common descriptive notes people have to write using text when they post links or images to blogs, comments or anywhere in HTML is to say “this link is not safe for work” or simply “NSFW”. By adding the <NSFW> tag, this could be made much simpler and standardized. Browsers could then have an option to automatically hide all <NSFW> content. A tag is preferred to an attribute since it could then also be used around content and not just links.

The idea is not that new, I’ve read about similar suggestions to implement this in HTML or in Microformats, but I always thought that it wouldn’t really work, or would end up being misused.

The idea to use a tag to somehow hide content goes back to the discussion of separating content from presentation and behavior, and the fact that something could be “NSFW” is mostly an opinion, so I don’t see a proper way to standardize this.

What do you think?