Thursday, August 06, 2009

Annals of hegemony

From a patent application that was granted (a couple of days back) to Microsoft who claims to have 'invented' a method of creating documents using an open standard which (ironically) was in vogue forty years ago. Harkens back to the time when 'enterprising' folks in our United States started patenting Ayurvedic ingredients...

A method for creating a document in XML ("Extensible Markup Language") in a computing device that is understandable by many applications, comprising: accessing a published XSD ("XML Schema Definition") in said computing device, wherein the XSD defines rules relating to the XML file format for documents associated with an application having a rich set of features; determining an element to create in an XML file in said computing device, wherein the element is selected from a set of elements, including: a style element; a hints element that includes information to assist an external application in displaying text of the of the document; a bookmark element; wherein the bookmark element includes an identifier attribute that associates a start bookmark with an end bookmark element wherein two bookmark elements are used in book marking a portion of the document; wherein each of the two bookmark elements include an opening tag and an ending tag; a document properties element; a text element that contains text of the document; wherein all of the text of the document is stored within text elements such that only the text of the document is contained between start text tags and end text tags; wherein there are no intervening tags between each of the start text tags and each of the corresponding end text tags and wherein each of the start text tags do not include formatting information for the text between each of the start text tags and the end text tags; a text run element that includes the formatting information for the text within text elements; a font element; a formatting element; a section element; a table element; an outline element; and a proofing element; creating the document including the element in said computing device; and storing the document in said computing device.

The legal gobbledygook in the document will ensure that only those with pockets deeper than Microsoft can challenge this one - which is basically 'nobody' (at this point in time)...
Has anybody heard of the word 'monopoly'?

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