Microsoft To Delay IE "Smart Tags" Release

Erbo writes: "CNET reports that Microsoft has decided to drop Smart Tags from Internet Explorer 6.0, the version that will be packaged with Windows XP. They may be resurrected later, though, so don't yank those META tags out of your pages yet. Smart Tags are still part of Office XP, too."

Comments

Re:Make MS (and their clients) poor

[Anonymous Coward]

Suggested Moderation: -1, Wannabe Legal Advice

Thank you.

Open Source Smart Tags

[Doc Technical]

I've written an Open Source program, gTags, that gives Smart Tag capabilities to Linux/X Window applications. It's non-intrusive, that is, it doesn't modify the appearance of web pages or other apps (I couldn't if I wanted to). Instead, gTags spies on the X Window selection buffer (the clipboard) and matches against that.

gTags uses the same XML schema as Microsoft Smart Tags. I've added the ability to create a Default tag which can optionally be used to "match" selected words that don't match any other (specific) tags.

I guess the main difference between gTags and Microsoft Smart Tags is that the user has to actively choose what they want to do.

gTags is alpha software, but seems to work well enough. Suggestions and contributions are welcome. Read more about gTags here.

Overreact much?

[generic-man]

The linked site has something that Slashdot has never provided: a screen shot of Internet Explorer 6 with Smart Tags enabled. Although the site presumably contains many buzzwords (XML, SOAP, and even "Smart Tags") only one word is actually given the dreaded purple underline. That word? "Microsoft."

The suggested links aren't even as blatantly pro-Microsoft as you might think. It looks like they're the same content you could get about any company from any financial news site (news for MSFT, report for MSFT, chart for MSFT, etc.) and an option to search the web for the company name. In fact, when you search for "Microsoft" on MSN, there are still anti-Microsoft pages linked after the more relevant ones. (Check out link #25. Most people searching for just "Microsoft" aren't looking for MS-bashing, either.)

Please, stop overreacting until you've actually seen what Smart Tags do. The article cautions that Smart Tags are still in Office XP. Those are safer still: the usual company stock-price import facilities, as well as the option to automagically import addresses from your Address Book. That makes life simpler when you're typing a letter.

No, I'm not a Microsoft supporter or shareholder, but the constant MS-bashing is completely uncalled for. (Notice also how I did not use "Micro$oft", "M$", "Microsquish", or any other stupid manglings in my write-up here.)

Extensive review of Smart Tags

[revscat]

A List Apart has a really excellent overview of Smart Tags (firewall is acting strange... can't get exact link right now...). It gives detailed explanations about why Smart Tags are dumb, both from a legal/copyright standpoint and from a technical standpoint.

Didja know that to add Smart Tags on someone's system you just have to put in some properly formattted XML at the beginning of your web page? So say you "accidentally" surf to some porn site with this crap in it, now everytime you type a document in Word XP the word "the" is underlined in purple with a link to the porn site only a click away.

This is an egregious example, but not *too* egregious. It's a good thing that MS is taking these out of IE6, which otherwise looks to be a fairly decent browser. (Still pulling for Mozilla, but increasingly skeptical... <sigh>.)

- Rev.

Wrong. Office tags == IE tags

[throx]

The smart tags in Office XP are IDENTICAL to the smart tags that were going to be in IE6. If you even bothered to do just a little research on msdn.microsoft.com you would have found this out very quickly.

Smart Tags were simply provided by a filter DLL and could do pretty much anything - the default ones in Office XP just link names to your contact list and so on, but you can enable the ones that link 'MSFT' to investor.msn.com for stock quotes and the like.

The Smart Tag technology was a great idea. People want to be able to enrich their web surfing - I for one wouldn't mind having a Slashdot tag enabled that provided an option for me to check out related stories on Slashdot - but the thing is most people didn't even understand what Smart Tags were (as evidenced by your post). It would have been good if MS left these in the browser but with NO filters enabled by default. That way a clued in user could simply enable the ones they wanted and browse the web the way they wanted to.

When it comes down to it, so long as it is the user is in control of what they view there can be no complaint from web publishers. Users have the right to render web pages in whatever way they feel, and if that includes user specified smart tags then I think more power to users is a good thing.

Different types of smart tags

[Keelor]

The smart tags that are included with Office XP, from what I've heard, are entirely different ones than the ones that everyone was up in arms about for IE 6.0. From what I've read, the smart tags in Office are basically Microsoft finally realizing that users don't want their word processor assuming that they need help writing a letter. When a user does something that would trigger an automatic response in prior versions of the software, a smart tag pops up so that people can choose to have help with what they're doing, instead of having to hit undo a bunch of times and scream at their computer that they don't want the poor formatting from the text they just copied and pasted off the web.

The smart tags for IE 6.0, on the other hand, were considerably more insidious. Walt Mossberg's WSJ column today makes the argument that Microsoft has a responsibility as the creator of the most used browser to faithfully reproduce the original web page author's intent when their browser displays a page. Of course, he doesn't mention the fact that ignoring published standards has the same effect--not that Microsoft would ever do that.

~=Keelor

what if someone else controlled smart tags?

[abe ferlman]

Microsoft