Librenix has a piece on Microsoft’s proposed “Smart Tags,” (the
author is against them and proposes a way in which they’d be more
palatable) and a more interesting bit of related information, which
is the license under which all the site’s content is provided:
changes to presentation details allowed by the W3C HTML
specification are permitted, but “reproduction in a web browser” in
such a way that URL’s are added or links otherwise provided are
not.
From the article:
“The addition of Smart Tags is a content change to a
web page. Such a change is not merely a presentation or formatting
change like those that browsers have always performed. It is a
content change in a similar way as if I republished a document
marked-up with the addition of my own preferred references while
leaving the original text intact. On the web, however, this is
complicated by the fact that embedded links are an integral part of
the content.The opt-out meta tag that Microsoft provides for websites to add
to each and every one of their pages demonstrates both Microsoft’s
arrogance and their understanding of the power of the default. They
know that the vast majority of pages will never be modified with
the disabling meta tag; the amount of work necessary to accomplish
that task would be staggering. Further, they realize that they can
simply require a slightly different format of the meta tag to opt
out in the next version of their browser, rendering previous
opt-out efforts obsolete.An obvious solution to these problems with Smart Tags is for
Microsoft to switch to an ‘opt-in’ policy for website publishers.
If a publisher believes that the Smart Tags feature is desirable to
end users, then that publisher can add an enabling meta tag and
allow Microsoft’s derivitive works of their pages to be shown. The
publisher, by adding the opt-in meta tag, would implicitly
authorize Microsoft to add new links en mass to their pages.”
From the copying policy:
“Copying and displaying our documents in a web browser
is considered a reproduction of the document and is covered by this
policy. Permission to reproduce our documents within web browsers,
in a way consistent with this policy, is hereby granted to all
without further limitation.Modifications to the presentation details of our documents by
web browsers are permitted and include all standard HTML permitted
changes including, but not limited to, font, color, and line
breaks. Other, nonstandard presentation modifications are also
permitted.The addition of Uniform Resource Locators (URL’s) or other links
not included in the original versions of our documents is
considered a content change and is not allowed without specific
permission. This includes changing the color or font, underlining,
embedding footnotes, or using any other means of highlighting a
word or fragment of our document in order to provide a link to
another website or to any other content not provided for in the
original document.”