RSSMicrosoft's move toward XML standards leads to $200 million penalty
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published May 21, 2009, 5:23 PM
During the era of Office 2000's dominance in the desktop applications market, Microsoft was frequently criticized for forcing businesses into supporting a document format that was, by design, a moving target. Whenever the company added features to its Office components, support for those features had to be retrofitted onto the document format. That often made archives of thousands of older documents difficult for companies to manage.
It was a situation which many thought would enable Microsoft to self-perpetuate, creating dependencies from which businesses couldn't escape, forcing them to invest in whatever new versions that came along just to maintain their efficiency. Whether it was attained by accident or design, it was such a prime market position for the company that when it announced in 2005 that it would sacrifice its own Office document formats for an entirely new, publicly viewable, XML-based scheme originally entitled Office Open XML, even Betanews asked the question, "Is It Truly Open?" To this day, even now that Microsoft's efforts led to the publication of an international standard based on OOXML, now called ISO 29500, people are wondering -- often aloud -- where's the string that's attached to this rug that Microsoft will eventually pull?
In the meantime, a company which was issued a patent in 1998 for the idea of maintaining a document's format in a separate file, has been awarded $200 million to a Toronto-based collaborative software firm, whose engineers claim they had the idea first. The case made by i4i Limited Partnership in its March 2007 suit essentially boiled down to the allegation that the entire move toward XML by Microsoft was a willfully executed strategy against i4i.
In 1994, just as HTML was first being investigated elsewhere as a vehicle for networked hypertext, i4i Ltd. applied for its US patent. For the time, its concept was novel as any notion of XML would be years away, and the applications for which XML would be used had yet to be envisioned.
"Electronic documents retain the key idea of binding the structure of the material with its content through the use of formatting information," reads the 1994 patent's background. "The formatting information in this case is in the form of codes inserted into the text stream. This invention addresses the ideas of structure and content in a new light to provide more flexible and efficient document storage and manipulation."
The engineers mention SGML, the markup language which formed the foundation for HTML. But SGML created problems with regard to formatting, as they went on to write: "While embedding structural information in the content stream is accepted standard practice, it is inefficient and inflexible in a digital age. For manual production of documents the intermingling of the markup codes with the content is still the best way of communicating structure. For electronic storage and manipulation it suffers from a number of shortcomings. Current practice suffers from inflexibility. Documents combining structure and content are inflexible because they tie together structure and content into a single unit which must be modified together. The content is locked into one structure embodied by the embedded codes. Changes to either the structure or the content of the document require a complete new copy of the document."
This is a problem which the flexible formatting of XML (which is called "eXtensible Markup Language" for good reason) went on to solve. For its part, i4i had much of the same idea, essentially for creating a way to use extensible tags to mean whatever they need to mean in the context of an electronic document. As an example cited by the 1994 patent application, the tag pair <Chapter> and </Chapter> could be used to denote a chapter number in the electronic manuscript of a book, and <Title> and </Title> may offset the book's title. The meanings of those tags with respect to the document at hand could be defined by a separate document, or by many separate documents pertaining to different classes of typesetting machines or displays.
Did i4i create XML? Not specifically, though it did receive a patent for one of its principal ideas, years before the W3C began to come to the same conclusions. However, despite being what many observers at the time considered late to the game in adopting XML, it is Microsoft that ended up the loser in what some analysts are saying could be among the top five willful patent infringement awards in US history. The company has made clear it will appeal the jury's verdict.
Microsoft gets punish as it obstructed government action against trivial software patents. Microsoft did not want better laws, now it suffers the consequences.
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|Software patents are only good for companies that don't produce any software.
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|so you're not going to tell anyone that i4i submitted the idea to microsoft before microsoft copied it?
whatever.
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|hahahahahaha a jury's verdict hahahahahaha
What a dumb system; almost as dumb as the patent system...
I will wager my left testicle that this ruling shall be overturned by a panel of actually INTELLIGENT judges...
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|When did Betanews become so 'anti-Microsoft'???? MS news on your site is almost totally worthless because of the level of bias your articles bring 90% of the time. I personally think you're doing yourselves and your readers a disservice.
"To this day, even now that Microsoft's efforts led to the publication of an international standard based on OOXML, now called ISO 29500, people are wondering -- often aloud -- where's the string that's attached to this rug that Microsoft will eventually pull?" - To quote your article.
Forget questioning how a verdict like this will affect the rest of the industry - you just seem to be happy MS lost.
- Disappointed Reader
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|A patent troll. The whole software patent system is useless except for financial engineering.
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|Sounds to me like i4i invented XML.
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|"that the entire move toward XML by Microsoft was a willfully executed strategy against i4i."
They seem to be full of themselves. Microsoft should be praised for going to XML, not punished. And i4i could/should have spoken out years ago about other outfits using XML. Seems that they're just interested in the money.
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|This is an absurd idea to patent, and wasn't novel at all. Framemaker+SGML as well as LaTex all did this, in some cases a full decade before i4i even began to consider the idea. SGML had already been used for document prep for just about forever at large companies... now ask yourself this: how could you write a document in SGML unless you put the format instructions in a separate file???
In fact - quite the opposite - HTML was the very first SGML format I'd ever heard of where formatting WAS included in the document!!
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|Your article suggests that i4i proposed to patent something like XML, but from what I can gather reading the patent, that's not accurate. XML (or rather SGML) simply provides their illustrative example. The patent proposes to parse a marked-up document in such a way that the markup instructions are stored separately from the document text. The markup instructions in one file are keyed to the text in another file by keeping track of the character position in the text where a markup is needed. Thus the markup file says "at character 0 in the text file we need a tag" (or whatever markup convention you want). This allows the markup file to managed completely separately from the text. For example, you could change to without even opening the text file.
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|IN the previous comment, I attempted to use XML markup but it was removed. Should be something like ". . . we need a {chapter} tag. . ." ; "you could change {chapter} to {section}. . ."
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|I didn't suggest that i4i _patented_ XML. What I did ask (and answer forthwith) was whether it _created_ XML, in essence, by virtue of obtaining a patent on its principal ideal. But XML is relatively recent; SGML as a markup language for typesetting predates it by several years. XML did not exist at the time i4i filed its application; SGML did.
-SF3
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|These patent discussions can get very complicated for sure. But surely one can not patent an idea but only a detailed implementation of that idea. And what about the existence of prior art especially in this case?
I believe getting a patent at all should be much harder than it currently is.
How this for patent reform? If you produce a new idea and an actual working product you get 100% ownership, less than that you get only 50% ownership. Would that encourage less frivolous patents?
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|I think the progression of tags such as HTML and XML started with TeX, created by Donald Knuth. Leslie Lamore built on TeX, with macros that made TeX easier to use, and that was called LaTeX. This is where my memory gets fuzzy but I believe SGML was based on either TeX or LaTeX, someone more knowledgeable than I can probably remember. Then HTML was based on SGML and from HTML became XML.
Both TeX and LaTeX had files, secondary to the main document, that contained macros, footnotes, etc. This was back in the the mid- to late 80's.
Again, this may be incorrect as that was 20 years ago but that is what I can remember.
Regards,
Murray
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|Sounds more like they patented CSS.
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