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Eolas COO Says IE Changes A Shame
capt turnpike writes "Hot on the heels of Microsoft's announcement of a 60-day period in which Web developers will have to change their pages' architecture, the COO of Eolas, the company whose suit forced these changes, gives an interview to eWEEK.com in which he says these changes are a disappointment. Confused? From the article: 'There is no court order forcing Microsoft to do anything. Anything that is being done is of Microsoft's own choosing,' His position is that publicizing these forced changes strengthens MS's case."
Exactly. The summary doesn't make it clear that he is saying that the changes are not required because Microsoft could simply pay them for the privilege of not changing it. I say, you sue somebody for doing something, you forfeit your right to complain when they stop doing it!
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
That should be: "Eolas is probably sad that MicroSoft hasn't bought them outright"
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Well, having had a quick look at the MSDN article linked to from the eWeek article, it doesn't look like such a big deal.
If the object is instantiated by in-line code, it will still respond to scripting commands but will not respond to user commands until they click somewhere in particular. If an external "JScript" file (does it hurt that much to say "Java", M$?!?!), is used to instantiate the object, there is no change in the way the page will behave.
So, we can make minor changes to all our ActiveX control-embedding pages to keep them behaving the way they do now, or not. The world will not end.
Nothing interesting to say...MUST...NOT...REPLY...ohtheheckwithit.
Even if IE still used netscape's plugin architecture, it wouldn't matter. Any plug-in architecture that handles EMBED, OBJECT, or APPLET tags by loading the appropriate plugin when necessary is subject to the patent.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000