[torsoboy]

This is pretty interesting!

Judge bans Microsoft Word sales

Of course they will appeal, but it is very interesting none-the-less.

So someone has a patent on XML? I certainly hope that is not the case, or that their patent is taken away.

[kylef]

Does Apple's "Pages" use XML?

[Chuckit]

It appears he has a patent on XML. Like Microsoft says, it's pretty clearly invalid.

And yes, all the major word processing apps including Pages use XML these days.

[torsoboy]

Thanks for the correction... a patent, not a copyright. It has been fixed in the original post.

The judge upheld the patent though, and even awarded an extra $40 million in punitive damages because they "willfully" infringed on the patent.

If this holds up, there may be a pretty giant shake-up in the internet world.

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Is the patent "pretty clearly invalid"? I'm curious (not having seen the case at all).

greg

[shabbasuraj]

Canadian firm gets patent win over Microsoft - The Globe and Mail

[Oisín]

So … you can’t use XML now?

And … XHTML is an extension based on XML, much like DOCX is.




Uh-oh … bye-bye, Internets. It was nice knowing you.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by ShortcutToMoncton 

Is the patent "pretty clearly invalid"? I'm curious (not having seen the case at all).

greg

I haven't read the patent itself, but from all the summaries I've seen, it would appear to be bogus, at least under US law (for instance, it would cover Web pages). Of course, patent summaries in news articles are often pretty terrible, so maybe everybody's been excluding something important.

[Oisín]

Here’s the patent, for those who want to read the whole thing.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Oisín 

So … you can’t use XML now?

And … XHTML is an extension based on XML, much like DOCX is.




Uh-oh … bye-bye, Internets. It was nice knowing you.

Mac OS X uses XML. So does Windows, and Linux. Pretty much all modern software uses XML. If this patent survives the appeal (which I doubt it will), we'll probably all have to shut down all computers and go back to the 1960s.

[shabbasuraj]

I heard that the INTRAWEB is going to get turned off also. (after this)

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Mac OS X uses XML. So does Windows, and Linux. Pretty much all modern software uses XML. If this patent survives the appeal (which I doubt it will), we'll probably all have to shut down all computers and go back to the 1960s.

Oh crap. I hate bobbed hair.

[SpaceMonkey]

Originally Posted by Oisín 

Oh crap. I hate bobbed hair.

But I love FORTRAN.

[TETENAL]

Originally Posted by Oisín 

Here’s the patent, for those who want to read the whole thing.

Sounds like the opposite of XML to me. More like a SimpleText document (text with style runs separated into the resource fork).

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

Sounds like the opposite of XML to me. More like a SimpleText document (text with style runs separated into the resource fork).

I thought it sounded like SimpleText too when I skimmed the document, but clearly somebody thinks it's more like the Open XML format.

[Oisín]

So we don’t have to go back to the ’60s after all?

Phew. What a relief.

[Laminar]

Originally Posted by SpaceMonkey 

But I love FORTRAN.

The aerospace engineers at my school still had to learn FORTRAN.

[shifuimam]

I must have had some stupid sauce today, because I don't understand how their "patent" is any different from XML.

What are they going to do about RSS?

[lpkmckenna]

i4i is not claiming they have a patent on XML or that patents on XML or any other markup language are invalid. If I follow the jist of their claim, they have created a process that is superior to standard markup language processes. Word apparently uses this process in the DOCX file structure without acknowledging the patent.

Exactly the benefits of this process are hard for me to determine, but I don't think we've yet seen a quality write up on what this lawsuit is really about. Everyone is saying "what's the difference between them and XML?" when that's not really what patent is about. I think it will be a few days before anyone on the web really understands and explains the significance of this patent for the understanding of us laypeople.

Lastly, this company is not some slimey patent troll. They sell actual products using this patent, and have some very big customers. Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to have weaseling out a paying for a patent other big companies gladly pony up for. (MS steal others technology? No way!)

The best thing that could come out of this is that Microsoft is forced to abandon its ridiculous DOCX file format and use a saner format like OpenOffice's ODF. More likely, MS will be forced to pay for the licensed patent.

Microsoft became aware of i4i when the firm was tapped by the U.S. government after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to help “connect the dots” between different agencies, Mr. Vulpe said. Rather than licence i4i's technology, Microsoft chose instead to just incorporate it into its Word products, he added.

This is obviously not some shady IP company. They are data-management miracle workers.

[Chuckit]

ODF is a "saner format"? IIRC, it's a ZIP of a directory of XML files that contains an XML-format directory of files which are written in an XML dialect specifying a couple dozen namespaces containing settings, elements and content. There's probably a few more levels of XML thrown in there that I forgot.

Oh, and it might fall under this patent too. But it's not very profitable to patent troll OpenOffice.org.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

ODF is a "saner format"? IIRC, it's a ZIP of a directory of XML files that contains an XML-format directory of files which are written in an XML dialect specifying a couple dozen namespaces containing settings, elements and content. There's probably a few more levels of XML thrown in there that I forgot.

Isn't that exactly what .docx is?

[Chuckit]

Yep. That's what I'm saying — they both seem pretty darn similar to me.

[OreoCookie]

Well, .docx is to my knowledge much more complicated in structure (to make it harder to write good import filters perhaps?).

[analogue SPRINKLES]

Blame Canada. We all know the only thing that will happen is MS will cut them a big check and be done with it. If I was the company I would make it hell for them though to try to kill stupid word altogether.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by analogue SPRINKLES 

Blame Canada. We all know the only thing that will happen is MS will cut them a big check and be done with it. If I was the company I would make it hell for them though to try to kill stupid word altogether.

It couldn't kill Word. They would just go back to the legacy Word file format, which is the worst possible outcome.

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

It couldn't kill Word. They would just go back to the legacy Word file format, which is the worst possible outcome.

Oh, you mean the format that can actually be opened in any kind of application?

(As opposed to .docx, which, in my experience, only opens about half the time, even in Word 2008)

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

Yep. That's what I'm saying — they both seem pretty darn similar to me.

They both have the features you complained about - a ZIP file containing all the XML whatnot, but Microsoft intentionally makes their XML files about 50 times more complicated in an attempt to deliberately screw up third parties that attempt to parse it, while still being able to claim their format is "open". That's what would make ODF saner, at least IMO.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by Oisín 

Oh, you mean the format that can actually be opened in any kind of application?

(As opposed to .docx, which, in my experience, only opens about half the time, even in Word 2008)

That file format is a huge, closed, binary mess, and most of the applications that attempt to open it will screw it up somehow. (For example, TextEdit wrecks the line endings and links in old-style Word files. Lovely! And Quark will just vomit so much nonsense you're better off copying and pasting.)

[tooki]

The claim sounds completely bogus to me since, as best I can understand patent-ese, the separation of content from style in the manner described was invented by Charles Simonyi in the late 70's — the same Charles Simonyi who works for Microsoft and birthed Word.

As it is, the Word way of storing text is very sensible, because it means that to determine the formatting of a word, paragraph, etc. somewhere in a document, you don't need to load all the preceding text, as you do in stream-based formats (where a formatting code on page 1 could still be "open" and thus apply to the entire document). On a computer with 4GB of RAM, loading a 200p document into RAM is no problem, but back in 1985, when the first version of Word came out, computers had so little RAM that many apps could only handle a few pages of text. Word's method made the document length essentially irrelevant.

The reason the Word format is so hard to import isn't because MS is an a$$hat trying to make it hard, but rather because of a simple fact: a file format represents, abstractly, every single feature in the app that creates that file. To correctly import a Word file, you have to be able to correctly interpret every tag in the document, which means that your app must correctly re-create every single feature in Word (including undocumented, undefined, or erroneous behaviors). Which is essentially impossible.

The docx format simply moves the Word document structure out of a proprietary binary format to an XML structure, but it changes nothing of the nature or structure of a Word document, per se. The demands that MS move from binary to XML didn't really change anything, it just made it trivially easier to locate the various "chunks" of information in the file.

(The oldest binary file formats were little more than binary dumps of the app's memory. Since that tightly ties a document format to an OS and processor structure, that method is pretty much extinct. But even more abstract binary formats remain more efficient than XML.)

P.S. The history of Word, which can be read in pieces on the MSDN blogs, is absolutely fascinating. (The history of Office in general is surprisingly interesting. Most people would be surprised to know that not only did all 3 of the core Office apps — Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — debut on the Mac, so did Microsoft Office as a whole.)

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

That file format is a huge, closed, binary mess, and most of the applications that attempt to open it will screw it up somehow. (For example, TextEdit wrecks the line endings and links in old-style Word files. Lovely! And Quark will just vomit so much nonsense you're better off copying and pasting.)

Old Word documents would often get a bit jumbled, yes. But at least they’d open, rather than just throwing some random error message and being generally useless.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by tooki 

P.S. The history of Word, which can be read in pieces on the MSDN blogs, is absolutely fascinating. (The history of Office in general is surprisingly interesting. Most people would be surprised to know that not only did all 3 of the core Office apps — Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — debut on the Mac, so did Microsoft Office as a whole.)

I actually have an issue of MacWorld in a box somewhere that introduces Microsoft Office.

[TheoCryst]

Ironic that all this happened the day before MacBU announced a new version of Office...

[OldManMac]

I wonder when MS is going to have to stop selling it, as it's still being sold today.

[analogue SPRINKLES]

Originally Posted by OldManMac 

I wonder when MS is going to have to stop selling it, as it's still being sold today.

You read the link in the original post or not?

"Microsoft has 60 days to comply with the injunction but said in a statement that it will appeal the ruling."

[OldManMac]

I missed that. Thanks for pointing that out.

[Wiskedjak]

Originally Posted by analogue SPRINKLES 

Blame Canada. We all know the only thing that will happen is MS will cut them a big check and be done with it.

Better hope that's not what happens. If it does, this company will start going after *every* company using XML.

[TheoCryst]

Originally Posted by Wiskedjak 

Better hope that's not what happens. If it does, this company will start going after *every* company using XML.

Microsoft's got cash, yeah... but $290M is a lot even for them. Don't count on a quick settlement: they'll likely fight this thing all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.