I've just woken up at 6am because I can't sleep from the heat, and in between getting a drink of water and setting up the fan I had an idea. Since this is the 21st century, instead of writing it down on a piece of paper and going back to sleep, I'm blogging it. :) If it seems a little oddly written it's because I'm still mostly asleep. I'll make corrections in the morning.
So on to my idea. I read somewhere that Microsoft will probably be re-introducing smart tags into Longhorn, and it ocurred to me that if you can't switch it off from your page, then the best way to combat them is to make them stand out. Now I don't know how the software will work with stylesheets, but when it does come out there will probably be some trick to make the smart-tagged links stand out from the links put on the page on purpose.
When this is done, all that needs to be done is to include, in a prominent place, a link that says something like "Why do some links look different?" that links to an explanation of smart tags, why they are bad and how to turn them off. I think if many people did this, it might make a difference.
Anyway, I'm going to try and sleep another hour before I get up. I'll probably edit this later on.
Update: Busy day, haven't been able to update before. I was going to modify the post to add more details and fix a couple of style problems, but I'll just leave it as is. It's not that bad.
Anyway, now that I've given it some more thought, I figure that smart tags will probably just use the default style specified for a link in the page's CSS. This would make my idea quite straightforward to implement by just specifying a huge font or wacky colours and then giving your links a specific class which is the style you really want. This has the disadvantage of filling up the code with junk, which is the kind of thing style sheets were invented to avoid, but it's the only way I see after thinking about it for a while.
In static HTML, anyway. We'll have to wait until the new browser comes out to see if there is anything that can be done from javascript, perhaps. Depending on where the program logic fits in the browser, using DHTML techniques for retrieving text in tables, etc. could be used to find rogue links.
Who knows, maybe it will be possible to disable them with a META tag. :) It doesn't matter much anyway, it's a fun mental exercise.
Posted by Dave at July 21, 2003 06:34 AM