[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: (Second) Last Call for XPointer 1.0
There's a much more significant issue raised in this draft for the first time than the question of how to map namespace prefixes. It's also come to light in this draft that Sun claims a patent on some of the technologies needed to implement XPointer. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000OctDec/0092.html I think this is particularly offensive because Eve L. Maler, a Sun employee, serves as co-chair of the XML Linking Working Group and a co-editor of the XPointer specification. As usual, Sun wants to use this as a club to lock implementers and users into a licensing agreement that goes beyond what Sun and the W3C could otherwise demand. For instance they want to force you to grant your own modifications and experiments back to the W3C. The specific patent is United States Patent No. 5,659,729, Method and system for implementing hypertext scroll attributes, issued to Jakob Nielsen in 1997. http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='5,659,729'.WKU.&OS=PN%2F5,659,729&RS=PN%2F5,659,729 (Apologies if that URL gets wrapped by my mailer; there's a direct link from today's Cafe con Leche, http://www.ibiblio.org/xml) The patent was filed on February 1, 1996. It claims: Embodiments of the present invention use a new extension to the HTML language to support remotely specified named anchors. A remotely specified named anchor, when embedded within a source document, instructs a browser program to access a portion of a destination document indicated in the remotely specified named anchor. When the browser program reads a remotely specified named anchor such as <a href=http://foo.com/bar.html/SCROLL="Some Text"> from the source document, the browser program performs the following steps: 1) the browser retrieves the destination file "bar.html" from the server "foo.com", 2) the browser searches the file bar.html for "Some Text", and 3) if the browser finds the character swing being searched for, then the browser displays the file bar.html, scrolled to the line containing the first character of the character string being searched for. It's very questionable whether this is truly an original invention with no prior art. HyperCard and Xanadu both had capabilities like this. It's also questionable whether the patent as written really applies to XPointer. For instance, the patent mandates a certain behavior of browsers. XPointer doesn't. I also think that the proposed "XPointer patent terms and conditions" are unenforceable as currently published. I recommend complete rejection of this specification until such time as Sun's patent can be dealt with more reasonably. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | The XML Bible (IDG Books, 1999) | | http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/books/bible/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764532367/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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