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Blackboard Patenting Educational Groupware
chizz writes "Online learning provider Blackboard announced the other day that it has patented the Learning Management System (LMS). The very same day it went after Desire2Learn for Patent infringement in a truly Salt Lake City kinda way. A great many educators are a bit shook up by this, and are stockpiling prior art all over the place. "
I wonder what your thrust is... it seems a bit elitist. You're perfectly happy working with all of the components of a URL, and can probably do some interesting investigative work by editing them in creative ways.
The vast majority of the population is not a member of your?little&URL%20editing+club, and I really don't see a major reason to require that bit of technical prowess to be able to use the vast majority of network resources effectively. They only know URLs from the "dubya dubya dubya" stuff that they hear in a radio advertisement, and for them, it's all they need to get started.
Clicking a hyperlink isn't actually a user using URLs. The user is just using the hyperlink. All that URL stuff is just an implementation detail behind the scenes, mostly unseen, where all implementation details should be.
Yes, browsers expose URLs in tooltips and status bars and properties boxes, as well as in other ways. Sometimes you need to learn a bit of this to protect yourself from goatse.cx or virusland.com. In my opinion, all this is a just a crappy stopgap in a leaky metaphor. User interfaces for most products should not require especially technical knowledge of the implementation.
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