Recreational Software Advisory Council (RSACi)
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The Recreational Software Advisory Council (RSAC) rating system was developed
in 1994 for rating computer games. In 1996 it launched the RSACi ( Recreational Software Advisory Council
on the internet) content rating system for web pages. RSACi is compatible with the
Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS)
standard.
The RSACi
system provided information about the level of sex, nudity, violence and
offensive language in a web page. The system allowed a webmaster to rate each page within the website.
The RSACi rating system relied on a webmaster filling out a questionnaire. The questionnaire
asked specific questions about the page content found within the webmaster's site. The webmaster
would submit the questionnaire to the RSAC web server which would respond with the HTML content advisory tags that the webmaster
could include in their web page. An Internet browser configured to read the RSACi system
can recognize these tags. Web pages would be displayed if they met the criteria selected by the user (parent, school, etc.).
Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.x or greater and Netscape
Navigator 4.x supported the
RSACi system. The Content Advisor in Internet Explorer supports the RSACi rating
system by using a rsaci.rat file. The rat (RATing) file contains the rating system
information that the browser can use to compare against the HTML content tags
found on a rated web page. By default the browser looks for the rating files in
the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM folder. If your system doesn't have the file you can download
the rsaci.rat file and save it to your WINDOWS\SYSTEM subdirectory.
In the Spring of 1999 RSAC became part of ICRA.
The ICRA ratings system was launched in December 2000. ICRA no longer is
supporting the RSACi rating system.
Next Section - Internet Content Rating Association
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