System and method for incorporating smart tags in online content

A system and method is provided for integrating and executing smart tags in online content for display by a computing application on a client computer without the deployment of client side code. The computing application includes a helper object and a recognizer/action handler. The computing application requests content from one or more cooperating content servers over a communications network. Upon receipt of the content, the computing application executes the helper object to parse the received content for a smart tag list file, related to the received content. After receiving the smart tag list file, the recognizer/action handler incorporates the smart tags and associated actions from the smart tag list file into the document for display to participating users.