[thelist] IE update

Peter-Paul Koch gassinaumasis at hotmail.com
Thu Oct 9 10:15:57 CDT 2003


>...and you're going to indemnify Microsoft in case they do need to hand 
>over
>the $500-odd million?

They´ll use a fraction of that money to buy new lawyers who´ll find a new 
loophole.

>It seems that the hundreds of intelligent developers at Microsoft, Apple,
>Macromedia, plus their legal teams and marketing people have come up with
>this as the "least worst" solution, in response to a legal defeat.

I doubt whether there are hundreds of them. Besides, only Microsoft has 
actually done something.

Apple has added a few pages to its site, but they only address IE Win 
problems. Not a breather about anything changing in Safari. And what does 
Macromedia do? Haven´t heard a word.

>You brand it as "too silly" - and your solution is "do nothing, of course".
>How silly of me! Your suggestion is eminently obvious as the preferred
>course of action. I would assume that you're offering this advice as an
>accomplished Patent lawyer? An expert in the field who can give an informed
>opinion on the chance of
>Microsoft winning the case (since there is a substantial amount of money
>involved here...)

But Microsoft still breaks the patent.

OK, so unmodified Flash movies show an alert. Great, and it breaks the 
seamless embedding stuff that this patent seems to be about.

But as soon as you document.write it into the page from a script located in 
a separate file, or when you use the new attribute, it doesn´t show any 
alert and the user still gets a seamless embedding experience (or words to 
that effect). That breaks the patent, in my understanding.

(BTW: the proprietary attribute *does not work*)

The IE update is not the solution to the patent problem, and I do not 
believe for a moment that it is meant for real distribution. In my opinion 
it´s meant to mobilize public support in favour of Microsoft (and that´s 
working fine, no doubt about it).

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ppk, freelance web developer
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