As much as I dislike Microsoft’s Smart Tags idea, you’d think that with all the discussion about it that David Winer would be able to avoid making this nonsensical statement about the technology,
I told a reporter yesterday that I would support Smart Tags if they allowed me to hack my links into Microsoft.Com, instead of the other way around. If you think this feature would gain support from independent Web developers, think again. (What a humiliating idea, for the Web, to even be talking about our independence from Microsoft.)
In fact, Winer will have the ability to make his own Smart Tags that will work with IE and could be used so that visitors to Microsoft.Com would be routed to his site via Smart Tags. Microsoft has been very clear that outside developers would be able to develop Smart Tags and that web masters will be able to include a meta tag header field in web pages to disable the feature (though realistically, whose going to download and install third party Smart Tag files?)
Microsoft’s idea still stinks in my mind, but they’ve addressed the concerns of web masters a lot better than the many other companies who came out with similar services that overlayed their own content on top of web pages.
How about a corporate death penalty for developers who make statements that are contradicted by the very articles they link to? Oy.