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Original NCSA XMosaic supported annotations, but was dropped on the way.

Here some discussions about this feature from 1993: http://1997.webhistory.org/www...

Is it like one of those "the web has to change" predictions which will be groundbreaking in 2009 ?

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1994q2/0007.html if you want a reference ;)

It helps to be funded to give it away. "Web browsers" came from CERN and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, both tax-funded organizations. The competition wasn't subsidized. There was Xanadu from Ted Nelson and Autodesk; that suffered from Nelson's fascination with micropayments. There were proprietary graphical clients, like AOL, but that had to be a closed world to make money. There were some big commercial services, like Nexis, Lexis, Mead Data Central, and Western Union InfoMaster, all closed pay systems.

At least five other "hypertext" systems preceded the Web. Intermedia, in the 1980s, was one of the better ones, but it was tied to Apple's version of UNIX (A/UX), which was a turkey later discontinued by Apple.

The early systems needed expensive hardware; that was the main problem. Somebody would have done this once the hardware got cheap enough.

Yep, everyone in the business knows this as prior art.

But that does not mean they can't sue. And then convincing a computer illiterate judge to expeditiously toss it out of court with costs is another mater. This is about patent extortion. Using the inept judicial system that really still hasn't finished with SCO after 6 years. With the legal costs so high, it is cheaper for many just to pay them $5M and call it a day. Some companies might.

But not being a US based company the odds are against them. RIM for example, not getting favorable treatment decided the damages to business growth was worth hundreds of millions in extortion. So they paid up. RIM not being a US company had the odds stacked against them.

The legal system needs to toss this kind of claim out quickly. And no one is holding their breath. Lawyers make too much money from cases like these.

Being that the email record of the development of these features is pretty widely distributed, they'd have a tough time defending that patent if anyone makes them try. Here's the original proposal by Marc Andressen:

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.html

In proposing the IMG tag, he explicitly says that it can be embedded in an anchor, and he describes its action. I have my doubts that these guys have prior art on web pages dating back to before 1993.

Thats the problem, none of the browsers fully implement any of the standards. Some are just better than others.

Just a thought.

HTML did not come about by having a committee sit for months in a room and then hand down graven tablets to be implemented. The actual implementors talked about it on a mailing list. Different features were proposed, discussed, implemented, discussed again, etc. The standards guys met afterwards to try to figure out what the standard was. Messy, maybe, but it worked. Implementation intermixed with specification. Free (open-source) reference implementations. That's how TCP/IP came about, too. We all use TCP/IP instead of the "standard" network protocols. (For those too young to know, the ISO was developing the real networking standards (OSI) for many, many years. TCP/IP was a protocol barely used outside academia before 1994. It wasn't included at all in Windows for Workgroups, it was not in the default Novell installation, etc.) Why are you guys not berating Thunderbird for its non-compliance with the e-mail standard (X.400)?

The best thing about standards is we have so many to chose from.

This issue was deal with many years ago with a never implemented encyclopedia system called the interpedia. The main notion was "Seals of Approval". For a brief introduction, see http://www.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1994q 1/1003.html

Isn't Marc Andreesen credited with the tag?

(The reference shows that it was an evil -- why not <Object> for any kind of extra inserted file? -- Andreesen did while at NCSA. The <Blink> tag was invented by Lou Montulli; additional reference if the wikipedia isn't sufficiently trustworthy).

I did a Google search on this topic, and the first link returned was the start of an email thread that turned out to be insightful reading on the key guys (Andreessen, Tim Berners-Lee, and many others) in early 1993 regarding the evolution of hypertext, HTML, and other related topics.

Maybe if you took the effort to try to know what the hell you're talking about, you wouldn't be pissed off so often. In fact, the Eolas patent included, as an appendix, the full source code for their plug-in enabled web browser, the one they released to the public in 1995.

They did make a product, in fact several. They created a Web browser that they demonstrated in '93 and '94, which was released in 1995. It was called WebRouser. In fact, Cringely pointed out that their browser was invalidating prior art to the SBC "frames" patent.

Even if the Eolas Patent were not obvious to someone skilled in the art, there is prior art. For example, Pei Wei's Viola browser supported applets.

Although the primary way this functionality is implemented today is through frames, the SBC application appears to pre-date frames appearing in Navigator. Remember, they had up to 1 year from the time of their work in order to apply for the patent in the first place. This pre-frames software, released in September of 1995 but well known far before that, shows all of the features claimed in the SBC patent, through use of LINK and GROUP tags. This should be all that's needed to invalidate the SBC patent, which was applied for in May of 1996.

http://www.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1995q 3/0566.html

You don't need frames to invalidate this patent. See the above-linked discussion of a 1995 browser's use of the <LINK> tag:

• "Most Web designers try to build in some sort of navigation system into their documents, usually at the top of the page. The problem arises when the user scrolls down the page and suddenly the navigation GUI is no longer visible. WebRouser's <LINK> command allows the Web document to place a button bar at the top of the screen, as a part of the WebRouser GUI. When the user scrolls down the document, the navigation buttons remain in place. Since the document drives the definition of the buttons' functions, each Web site can have its own Netscape-style "What's New," "What's Cool," etc. button bar pointing to their own content, not to some hard-coded browser company location, such as in other browsers."

They only licensed Mosaic from Spyglass to get IE 1.0(or was it 2.0?) out the door quickly.

But then in around about IE 3.0 Microsoft rewrote the whole thing from scratch without using the Mosaic code.

You claim that Netscape did some devilish thing and was sued for it, yet I have no memory of, and can find no record of, such an event ever having taken place. Are you thinking of the Netscape=>Microsoft antitrust suit?

Does Opera have a license with spyglass?

Legitimate question, I don't know... but are you saying that to create a browser you need it?

This is gratutious Microsoft bashing, plain and simple and a completely different situation than this Sendo story.

Larry Masinter
Xerox PARC
The Web Before the Web: System 33

In the late 80s Mark Weiser, Steve Putz, and others at Xerox PARC developed System 33, which foreshadowed some of the Web's multiple document format capabilities. This document sharing system let users interactively exchange documents of different sorts over a network, with format conversion on the fly.
Tim Berners-Lee visited PARC in 1992, and incorporated some of System 33's ideas into later Web specifications. A 23-minute videotape about System 33 and its format capabilities will be shown.

If anyone questions the value of the net as a source of historical data, check this out: Webhistory Mailing list archive ...where you will find the real-life (ie not a lame historical re-enactment) transactions which produced the modern web, one of the most significant events of the century. The 1993 archives contain mail from Marc Andreeson and others about creating forms, images, etc in the Mosaic (Netscape precursor) browser.

The web history project is trying to solve some of these problems. They are planning on maintaining an archive of snapshots of the web. However, they have yet to make any of their archive available.