The origin of KADOV tags

15 July 2009 RoboHelp

I was speaking to Matthew Ellison recently who passed on the following amusing piece of trivia about one of the first versions of RoboHelp and the concept of <KADOV> tags.

Apparently they originate back to the time when Microsoft released the first version of Internet Explorer. The RoboHelp developers RoboHelp knew that they needed to add tags to the HTML code to allow Internet Explorer to render it successfully. One of the lead developers was from Sweden where Explorer is a brand of Vodka. So he coded lots of <VODKA> tags to enable RoboHelp output to be displayed in the rather quirky Internet Explorer.

The trouble was, Microsoft objected to the use of such tags. So much so that they were forced to change them. What did they change them to? You guessed it, an anagram of Vodka.

Skål!

Internet Explorer, KADOV, KADOV tags, RoboHelp, Tags

Anita

I love this, thanks for the background information! Having once been a technical writer at Microsoft, I’m familiar with their sensitivity to language–we were NOT ALLOWED to use the phrase “execute a command” or “execute a program”, even though programmers use the word “execute” a lot. We had to use “run” instead.
- http://notcolin.wordpress.com/ Colum McAndrew
  
  Thanks for the insight into Microsoft Anita. “Run” is more user friendly and it survives to this day in their OSs from the Start menu.
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