There's a lot of FUD about smart tags in the browser: for one thing, they had to be explicitly installed, and required multiple acceptances before they could have been run... also they were written in pure XML, so could quite easily be examined - and even edited by the end user. Also a smart tag link looked very different to a standard link (including having a tool tip that popped up indicating that the link had been inserted by a smart tag...).
The side issue of the web being designer controlled is one thing that really annoys me. For one thing - Tim Berners-Lee's original browser allowed the addition of comments (and of course Annotea is a W3C standard for handling commenting using current technologies). The quicker we get to building a two-way, standards-based semantic web, the less likely we are to have the sort of problems you're talking about.
I do agree it's a pity that IE became the dominant browser, but Netscape took its eye off the ball and failed to fix the egregious rendering bugs in Netscape 4.7 (and that's ignoring its CSS problems!) - and Mozilla took two years longer to get around to shipping code than we all expected - leaving developers with two main browsers to target, both of which were similarly standards compliant: IE and Opera.
Luckily things are a lot better now. IE is unlikely to have a major upgrade for another year, Mozilla is forging ahead on becoming the standards-compliant reference browser of choice (and its spinouts are rapidly becoming more end user friendly - I fully expect whatever Phoenix becomes to rapidly become the number 2 browser on Windows, with a 25% market share, by the middle of 2004). And on other platforms, we're getting a wider choice of browsers than we've had for years - I'm currently composing this reply in one, the rather excellent OS X browser Safari.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2003-03-16 14:21 (UTC)The side issue of the web being designer controlled is one thing that really annoys me. For one thing - Tim Berners-Lee's original browser allowed the addition of comments (and of course Annotea is a W3C standard for handling commenting using current technologies). The quicker we get to building a two-way, standards-based semantic web, the less likely we are to have the sort of problems you're talking about.
I do agree it's a pity that IE became the dominant browser, but Netscape took its eye off the ball and failed to fix the egregious rendering bugs in Netscape 4.7 (and that's ignoring its CSS problems!) - and Mozilla took two years longer to get around to shipping code than we all expected - leaving developers with two main browsers to target, both of which were similarly standards compliant: IE and Opera.
Luckily things are a lot better now. IE is unlikely to have a major upgrade for another year, Mozilla is forging ahead on becoming the standards-compliant reference browser of choice (and its spinouts are rapidly becoming more end user friendly - I fully expect whatever Phoenix becomes to rapidly become the number 2 browser on Windows, with a 25% market share, by the middle of 2004). And on other platforms, we're getting a wider choice of browsers than we've had for years - I'm currently composing this reply in one, the rather excellent OS X browser Safari.