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SBC Claims Patent on Frame Navigation
Posted by Raul Ruiz on Wednesday, January 22 @ 12:53:51 EST
Contributed by HowardGilbert
Patent
HowardGilbert writes "SBC (the local phone company in the Yale area) has apparently sent letters to some poor Museum Tour operation claiming a Patent on the use of HTML Frames as a navigation aid. The patent itself clearly cannot cover Frames per se, since it was file in May, 1996, two months after Navigator 2.0 shipped with Frames support. However, the claim is that it covers the constant display of a "table of contents" so that when you click on an element in the table the corresponding section of the document is displayed in the user area.

There are about 15 years of prior art to invalidate this patent. The first thing to note is that the behavior of Frames is not unique to the Browser. This sort of thing was first created by the IBM 3278 datastream. You could break the window into regions that were separately programmed. About 20 years before the mouse was invented, IBM had a light pen that you could use to click on selectable fields on the screen. The last piece you need to know is that the HTML of Web pages is a dialect of Standarized General Markup Language invented by three IBM researchers in 1980. By the late '80s IBM had converted its entire documentation system to GML and had dozens of tools to edit and display the stuff. Notably, the IBM help system of OS/2 (the IPF or Information Presentation Facility) displayed online Help and Tutorials in a Frame-like arrangement that navigated a GML document that was 99% like HTML.

This shows in one simple example just how badly the Patent system is broken on software matters."
 
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"User's Login" | Login/Create an Account | 5 comments | Search Discussion
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Re: SBC Claims Patent on Frame Navigation (Score: 1)
by tompoe on Wednesday, January 22 @ 22:59:42 EST
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.studioforrecording.org/
I suppose Howard Gilbert only needs to be a little right on his prior art material to feel that this probably won't go anywhere for SBC. At the same time, I think it won't be long before we see extortion charges, fraud, and all sorts of criminal complaints against companies that know full well going into their patent apps that the PTO is like a retarded child, and their abuse constitutes criminal intent.

Thanks,
Tom Poe
Open Studios
Reno, NV
http://www.studioforrecording.org/
"There's no Public Domain unless we do it ourselves"


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Prior art on SBC Navigation (Score: 0)
by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Saturday, January 25 @ 22:05:36 EST
In the 1980's BBSes used ANSI to set a text window in online games so commands and navigation info would not be errased unless updated so the game need only update a small part of the screan each command/move.
Tradewars 2000

This based on applications using the same tecnique to simplify applications: example Nortion Commander.
This is also found in early 8 bit computers like the Commodore 64.
This permitted application nav menus to be on screen at all times.
Smart terminals included the ability to define a 'window' so nav info could remain on screen at all times for Unix mainframes and CP/M applications.
Wordstar for example.
Prior to that nav info was taped to the dumb terminal or printer as it was not yet possable.

Prior to that early transister game kits include directions including how to navigate the game on paper you glue to the finished product.

If not nav menus what are frames for?
No doupt Nav menus were used to test frames when first added to the HTML specs.


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