[thelist] More Smart Tags

aardvark roselli at earthlink.net
Mon Jun 25 08:52:05 CDT 2001


> From: Erik Mattheis <gozz at gozz.com>
>
> Isaac - your post reads pro-Smart Tag where your evolt article takes
> the other side - what gives, are you playing devil's advocate, taking
> the middle road, mistaken identity?

i didn't see it as pro-anything... i read it as more, "hey, let's look at 
this another way, and forget that it's MS"...

it's worth turning these things around to look at them, especially 
since the response on this kind of list will be pretty easy to gauge --
 not many folks are gonna like the idea for a multitude of reasons...

but ultimately, if the user sees value in it, we have to suck it up... 
the 'it hurts my design' excuse is an old and flawed one... user-
defined CSS or disabled JS will often make a page look odd, 
depending on how it was coded, but i think we all agree that 
allowing the user to have that control is a good thing...

> Nobody here knows what the final implementation of smart tags will be,
> IMO they won't be a problem, and if they do end up linking to MS
> preferred sites, it will be the lynch pin for MS ... but why any
> website developer would be into the idea as the IE 6 beta purportedly
> implements them is beyond me:

perhaps because they will have clients who want these smart tags 
to behave a certain way (either with links or disabling them or 
whatever)... a website developer *has* to be 'into' them enough to 
know what is and isn't possible...

> The point here is that there's _nothing_ that Smart Tags can do that a
> 4.0 browser cannot already do - except draw a purple wiggly line under
> text and make it easy for a third party direct the flow of traffic
> from a website they don't own.

yeah, and?  MS is just trying to find new features to keep their 
browser on the desktop... anything wrong with that overall?

> OK, so we're obliged to add a proprietary meta tag for every browser
> that decides they want to mess with our content?

well, yes, and that is unfortunate... but hey, aren't a lot of us 
adding favicon.ico files to our sites?  and how is it messing with our 
content?  the content doesn't change, it just stuff some unfortunate 
links into an ugly squiggly line...

> It seems to me (as well as others more versed in law than anyone on
> this list is likely to be) that this smart tag idea (as we understand
> it) is a blatant abuse of monopoly power.

i completely disagree with that... how is that abuse of monopoly?  
have you seen all the other browsers out there that users can get?  
free ones?  that easily do what IE can do?

there is a choice, user education not-withstanding...

> If this were some off-browser with a fraction of a percent of the
> market share the situation would be laughable - another silly dot-com
> idea ... but we're talking about what will be THE browser for the vast
> majority of we users who update their OS after October.

would you say that same if it Netscape?  you might say yes, but i 
think we're all letting our distaste for MS, and it's other presence in 
other markets, taint our perspectives here...





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