88092 - Implement Smart tags

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: XML, enhancement)

Description

[Joseph Elwell]

Someone should implement Smart tags to give the world an idea of what Smart tags
are capable of. Maybe cross reference all capitalzied words with whatever the
I'm feeling lucky search on google would get you for that word.

Comment 1

[Heikki Toivonen (remove -bugzilla when emailing directly)]

Heh, I've been tossing this idea around for some time. But no, I do not think we
should implement SmartTags as Microsoft has done (proprietary technology). 

We could, however, implement something like SmartLinks. Effectively the same
thing (although I think more powerful). The SmartLinks could be defined with W3C
standards: Extended XLinks and XPointers. It could be a single file that could
be refreshed from some server every now and then. These XML standards allow us
to specify links in various ways: URLs (maybe?), markup structures, content
models, strings and combinations of them all. For example, we could say that if
the word "Mozilla" appeared in a table heading we would make it a link to
www.mozilla.org.

There could be "automatic" SmartLinks from some SmartLink provider (like
Netscape), as well as user created SmartLinks. SmartLinks should look different
from normal links. Providers could even give different users different link
collections based on their preferences.

It should be possible to turn off smart links (both user and websites, but if
user really wanted them he should have them even if site tried to disable them I
think).

There are some pretty obvious legal things to consider. This can also be very
invasive, and people have strong opinions about this technology, as we have
learned when Microsoft introduced them and the net community went ballistic.

Comment 2

[Heikki Toivonen (remove -bugzilla when emailing directly)]

Wrong component...