I couldn't follow Cringely's logic that APPLET, EMBED, and Java would have to be dropped by MS to avoid infringing on the Eolas patent, but OBJECT, C#, and.NET could be retained.
Cringely states that Eolas has a patent (5,838,906) that covers "automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia documents" and so EMBED, APPLET, and Java would have to be dropped to avoid infringement. By the same logic, OBJECT and C# would have to be dropped, too, right? (which would kill Active X, including Sun's Java Plug-In, which uses the OBJECT tag, not the EMBED tag, and works fine w/ IE 5.5 SP2, see Plug-In HTML page)
He also states the patent covers "the use of any algorithm that implements dynamic, bi-directional communications between Web browsers and external applications" which seems like a pretty good description of what a SOAP-enabled Web browser does... so.NET would have to be thrown out, too.
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If you're interested in antipatterns, check out (of course) http://www.antipatterns.com/.
I couldn't follow Cringely's logic that APPLET, EMBED, and Java would have to be dropped by MS to avoid infringing on the Eolas patent, but OBJECT, C#, and .NET could be retained.
Cringely states that Eolas has a patent (5,838,906) that covers "automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia documents" and so EMBED, APPLET, and Java would have to be dropped to avoid infringement. By the same logic, OBJECT and C# would have to be dropped, too, right? (which would kill Active X, including Sun's Java Plug-In, which uses the OBJECT tag, not the EMBED tag, and works fine w/ IE 5.5 SP2, see Plug-In HTML page)
He also states the patent covers "the use of any algorithm that implements dynamic, bi-directional communications between Web browsers and external applications" which seems like a pretty good description of what a SOAP-enabled Web browser does... so .NET would have to be thrown out, too.