Use of Meta Tag - MSSmartTagsPreventParsing

[wcksmith]

We've inherited some sites from another developer that had the following tag:

All references I can find to it are from 2004.  What is the purpose and is it worth including in pages/sites we build?

[john4math]

The tag is to prevent Microsoft Smart Tags from rendering.  It was only included in beta versions of IE6, and no other browsers since.  It's not worth including; you can safely delete these tags.

An explanation of smart tags on wikipedia.

The same question on stackoverflow.