Redmond Rewrites the Web

mrG — Fri, 10 Jan 2003 06:38:40 -0500

This is a little disturbing: Clicking that smart-tags chicklet leads to the GlassDog campaign to educate you to a devious device slated to become part of the Windows eXPerience:

So any bets how many of those links will be paid-for product placements?

Even if it starts out noble and just, I'm still not so sure I like the idea of the courier rewriting the contracts they deliver, or marketeers annotating the books I read

... especially in ways indistinguishable from what the author intended. Hmmm ... what's that going to do to the already befuddled Internet trust metrics? If you can trust them, and maybe we can, there is a solution: GlassDog claims we can prevent re-writes of our pages by including the following tag into the HEAD section of each page on your site(s):

	<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE">

Yes, blogfans, once more and once again, is Microsoft foisting more work for me to do at my expense, just to counteract their predatory actions? Those who own their own can easily set this globally on an Apache server but the rest of us must edit each and every template. I can't believe people still need more reasons to switch; game addiction is a terrible thing.

Disclaimer: While Google shows lots of matches, none are from authorative voices --- and there are zero hits on this tag at Microsoft.com. While harmless in a page, before doing all that work, can anyone conclusively confirm the origin of this Meta-tag? Since MS does not even mention it, do we have any assurance they'd obey it?

It's significant to note that I encountered this little tidbit from a page on a new fully-functional and free community software multitrack recording studio for the Linux desktop -- seems every day now my 3 year old 2003 prediction is more and more believable.

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Redmond Rewrites the Web