Webmaster Tips

Microsoft's "Smart Tags"

Microsoft demonstrates their arrogance once again.

The recent release of Windows XP (Fall 2001) has a "feature" that many of us webmasters will find very annoying. They call it "Smart Tags".

This addition allows Explorer to recognize specific words in the text of your web pages and create links - whether you want them there or not - to wherever it is that M$ wants you to go. For instance, every time you include "word" on your site, they could link it to a sales pitch for M$ Word.

The howling produced by the internet community upon the announcement of this "feature" forced M$ out of having it be enabled by default. However, the "feature" is still there, and some people might actually turn it on.

Fortunately, there is a meta tag that you can include in your pages that will (at least for now) cause Smart Tags to be turned off.

In your page header (somewhere in between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags), include the folowing:

Add that to every page you have.

If you're smart, you already have an INCLUDE file for all your site-wide header tags, like the anti-framing javascript and this one. If not, now would be a logical time to create one. Check to make sure it's working right by pulling down VIEW to SOURCE in your browser. If it is, the code in the include file will appear in the appropriate place on your page.

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