POWDER

» see w3.org/2007/powder as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

POWDER stood for Protocol for Web Description Resources. It let a site publish machine-readable statements about whole groups of its own URLs, written in RDF and fetched over HTTP, so that a filter or a crawler could know something about what was behind a link without going and getting it. One description could cover an entire directory, which beat labeling pages one at a time.

The W3C chartered a working group for it in February 2007. On 1 September 2009 the group published three separate Recommendations on the same day, one defining the description format itself and another defining how you grouped the resources a description applied to. A Primer went out as a Note alongside them. The group's own page announced this as an event: POWDER is a W3C Recommendation, with an exclamation mark.

Voluntary labeling was a model that assumed the site described itself and your software decided what to do about it. In Turkey, what you could reach was settled upstream of the browser, at the line, and a declaration sitting on the page made no difference in either direction. I never saw a labeling preference in any piece of software I ran, and I would not have known what to do with one.

~ the timestamp in the footer ~

The working group page is still served from w3.org. Near the top it reads that the POWDER Working Group is closed and that the page is maintained for historial purposes only, carrying the typo it has carried since the day somebody wrote it. At the bottom sits a CVS keyword that the publishing system expanded and then froze, giving the revision number and the date 2009/11/24 at 15.33.35.

That date is the charter expiry. Nothing went wrong on the way. The group filed its deliverables and declared itself delighted that the chartered work was done. Then the charter expired, eighty four days after the Recommendations went out.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ who it was built for ~

The constituency was ICRA, the Internet Content Rating Association, a non-profit with an American arm and a British one, whose system let webmasters self-label for things like nudity and violence. That system had been built on PICS, the 1996 scheme POWDER was written to replace. FOSI absorbed ICRA's day-to-day operations in 2007, the same year the POWDER group was chartered, and in October 2010 FOSI discontinued the ICRA labeling engine and took the documentation down. Thirteen months after the W3C blessed a better way to publish labels, the people with the labels stopped publishing them.

The tools section of the group page lists four implementations. Three of them were tested on 14 October 2026. The validator and the processor from i-sieve Technologies both resolve and then return nothing at all, the PHP processor hosted at an Italian university answers 404, and TransOnto on SourceForge still serves its page. One of four is a reasonable survival rate for 2009 research software, and it would matter more if anything were still sending POWDER documents for them to read.

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