Subject: Microsoft Patent [was: License???] From: Chris Maden <crism@xxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 10:22:55 -0500 (EST) |
Looking at <URL:http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1& Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1= '5,860,073'.WKU.&OS=PN/5,860,073&RS=PN/5,860,073>, I am struck by a few things. I can't quite get a clear reading on the legal section, but the non-normative prose descriptions were telling: <quote> Unfortunately, all of the formatting commands for text or graphics in an SGML or HTML document are embedded within the document. The Mosaic or NetScape browsers do not reformat these tagged documents, but rather only display the commands embedded in the SGML or HTML documents to a user. For this reason, the designers that produce the SGML and HTML documents must add formatting commands to every new document. In addition, there is little flexibility to change the document's formatting once the tagged document has been produced. Therefore, the process of creating documents for display using SGML or HTML is very inefficient for the document designer. </quote> This shows a severe lack of understanding of prior art, to put it mildly (despite their reference to 5,557,722, De Rose et al., describing DynaText's stylesheet system). This is further demonstrated by a number of comments like: <quote> Presently known style sheets, such as those used in Microsoft Word, are associated with particular documents. </quote> Word works that way, but no known semantic markup system does. (I mean, at *some point* you have to introduce an association, since otherwise the document can't be formatted, but this is true for CSS and XSL as much as any other system.) The Microsoft system is described thusly: <quote> The display regions in a page do not contain any text at the time the style sheet is applied. Rather, the text is poured into the region when the title is displayed (also termed rendered) on the customer's computer. More than one display region, on the same page or on different pages within a title, may use the same style sheet. A title may also contain more than one style sheet, and the publisher is free to associate each display region on the page with any particular style sheet in the title. Additionally, style sheets can be shared between titles. </quote> I fail to see how this doesn't describe the process described by International Standard ISO/IEC 10179:1996 (DSSSL). Can one really patent techniques described in a Standard? I can understand specific computational algorithms pioneered to implement them, but to my reading, this patent covers the process. I got sick trying to read further on, when the Multimedia Presentation System (MSP) is described as ideally using MSN and OCX technology. A patent is not supposed to be granted to technology that would be obvious to anyone with experience in the field in question. This seems not only obvious, but already implemented by other companies. This looks like a Patent Office goof on the scale of granting a patent for "multimedia", defined as the combination of text and images in a single document. I would hope that the Patent Office will rescind the patent, or barring that, that Microsoft grants a free and clear license to materials covered by this patent to any and all without license. -Chris I am not a lawyer and I do not speak for O'Reilly, the XSL WG, the W3C, NASA, Microsoft, the CIA, or the voices in my head. -- <!NOTATION SGML.Geek PUBLIC "-//Anonymous//NOTATION SGML Geek//EN"> <!ENTITY crism PUBLIC "-//O'Reilly//NONSGML Christopher R. Maden//EN" "<URL>http://www.oreilly.com/people/staff/crism/ <TEL>+1.617.499.7487 <USMAIL>90 Sherman Street, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA" NDATA SGML.Geek> XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
Current Thread |
---|
|
<- Previous | Index | Next -> |
---|---|---|
Re: lambda was RE: W3C-transformati, Guy_Murphy | Thread | RE: Microsoft Patent [was: License?, Grant Steinfeld |
RE: lambda was RE: W3C-transformati, Didier PH Martin | Date | Re: lambda was RE: W3C-transformati, Chris Maden |
Month |