Smart Tag Architecture

You can think of smart tags as being made up of a recognizer component and an action component. The recognizer component checks to see whether any data passed to it is data that the smart tag should label and list actions for. If data passed to the recognizer is identified as a smart tag, the recognizer tells the hosting application that it should display the smart tag's actions for the item.

Recognizers work with actions, which are the verbs that the developer defines for their smart tags. The actions you implement can be anything that you can write in code. You can launch an application, add information to a database, or even send an e-mail or fax. You are not limited in the sorts of actions you can develop.

To get a clearer understanding of the smart tag architecture, look over Figure 9-3, which shows how smart tags relate to the Office applications. Notice that you need the Internet Explorer Binary Behavior, which comes with Office and can be freely distributed, for Internet Explorer to work with smart tags.

Figure 9-3: Smart tag architecture