12 September 2003

Good grief, following on from my bit about the patent, I wandered around that amazing place the Internet. Products I haven't touched for years (they are no longer published) and yet there's a number of mentions. Honourable mention is awarded to Magpie for this: ....Syracuse were among a number of similar magazines which used Longman Logotron's Magpie browser which held sway in the days long before HTML.... Ahhh, the days before HTML when everyone thought multimedia was it. On usenet I found an announcement about Magpie and Genesis from 1993 and our support for Acorn Replay - the external application that played by video files. posted at: 6:33:02 PM   A demo Zeepe 7 application has appeared over in Zeepe Applications: Originally written for IE4 some years ago (about 1997/8), this games presents randomly generated sums for drill'n'skill excercises. posted at: 5:40:08 PM   More on US Patent 5,838,906 (Eolas) IMHO, the patent covers the following: The 'automatic' invocation of an external interactive program in response to seeing some data stream within the 'source' document - not in some document 'attached' to the source document, but the original document. There must be external (to the original document) data for the external program to access. There can be communication between the host browser and the external program. The external program can contact, by some means, for whatever purpose, a process running on the (originating) server. What is not covered. Invocation of non-interactive code (e.g. provision of utility functions with no interactive function). Automatic download and installation of the required code for the external program. Invocation of code that does not access the external data source. Applets etc that simply provide alternative forms, UI, visualisation from client side collected data are not covered.  Invoked code that cannot communicate with the invoking browser nor appear within the browser window. I must admit that I don't understand how OLE/OpenDoc is not prior art - just saying 'make OLE/OpenDoc work on a network' doesn't appear much, if anything, of an invention, http is nothing more than a simple file system - but there we go, I don't understand the US patent system. Nor do I understand how client/server RPC is supposedly an invention in 1994. There were multimedia apps in the UK in the early 1990s on RISCOS that did video playback in the window - one in particular (Genesis) was very text file based (it had text documents that refered to external data) and could have very simply supported (i.e. no changes to the underlying code) what Eolas claim assuming that Acorn/anyone had written a module (http:) that worked like other RISCOS filing systems (adfs:/scsifs:/netfs:/strangedevicenamefs:) - Genesis did whole file reads so this would have been a doddle. I wrote a different one called Magpie that did similar things but worked on a single file for the whole MM document, so supporting http: would have been a bit more difficult. The data was stored in a compressed binary format (computer stored text does not equal binary data - discuss). What's funny is I've been meaning for years to rewrite Magpie using HTML - I did some of the work a few years ago - but now I won't be able to because of this patent, just because HTML runs over http - perhaps if I write it in HTML but it won't access a server, just the local file system then it won't breach the patent....   posted at: 12:55:44 AM

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