One more note this morning on smart tags.

Smart tags as more easily useful for the part of the web that is functional instead of the part that litterary. And both do exist.
8:20:22 AM    comments ==

I emailed Dave Winer last night with the distinction between a smart tag and a smart link. Where a Smart Tag is just some more markup that lets actions get associated depending on what the client is capable of. I pointed him to my example of a smart tag. Smart Links is a “feature” that does a specific set of recognizers run inside of web pages as you browse.

The answer I got back from him was what I would have expected as a responce to a post to something on /. . But he's way in the lead since he has said more intresting things then I have.

While I won't touch smart links with a ten foot poll, I still believe smart tags are a useful thing that will find its way into other web browsers. Mark an address as an address, and let the client decide how they want to map it or use it, instead of limiting the user to your own system. I imagine being in my car with some sort of fancy navigation system (which I don't own) and trying to get to a party or a restaurant that I have the address to. Right now all I could do is go to what ever link the person who made the page thought might be convenient to link to. I as a user I’ve got to type the address into my car’s system, or do some cut and pasting to get the data to another service. If they just marked the data as a smart tag, then my local client being aware of the car and being able to talk to it with something like SOAP could do something intelligent and tell the car that this is an interesting address. The car navigation system can pick it up from there.

Quick Quiz: What is a Smart Tag really?
Answer: It’s an island of XML in an HTML document that the client decides how to work with. Ideally the page should suggest some actions, but I the page viewer should be in control.

This is opt-in for both the client and the server as I’ve described. However it’s not quite completely realistic that everyone will magically start attaching address smart tags to their addresses. What’s a power user to do? I’d probably write a script that searches the page for addresses, and then lets me work with them. But now I’m getting dangerously close to recognizers in the page.
7:48:39 AM    comments ==