SBC Getting Aggressive With Frames Patent

mpthompson writes "Aspects of the SBC patent shakedown were covered previously on SlashDot, but the following article has more details including the royalty fee schedules on the two patents that SBC is seeking to enforce against web sites that utilize frames in their design. In short, SBC has asserted that it is the exclusive owner of a technology for "structured document" browsing - the use of frames to provide hyperlinks to documents displayed by a browser. Apparently the strategy by SBC is to set precedent against small web sites that will presumably capitulate before going after the big guys. Based on the fee schedule, SBC seems to be pretty serious about this whole patent thing and may not go away so easily."

Comments

Re:so use tables.

[ncc74656]

Tables nearly always work better than frames.

CSS works even better, as long as you use a browser with a decent CSS implementation. (A browser that doesn't grok CSS can still do an acceptable job with the site if the underlying HTML is clean enough...that's why separating content from layout is a Good Thing.)