"A decade after Dave Raggett began drafting the HTML+ specification, his work has become critical to an effort by the Web's founder and standardbearers to 'prevent substantial economic and technical damage' to the Internet. Documents written by the British pioneer are being cited by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in urging US officials to invalidate a controversial patent which could cover key Web functionality, including the Internet Explorer web browser and several tags in the HTML standard.
The patent in question is held by the University of California and licensed to Eolas Technologies, which in August won a $521 million court judgment against Microsoft after a jury found that the Internet Explorer browser infringed the UC/Eolas patent."
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"In my emails and in the HTML+ spec, I described the idea of using dynamically loaded libraries for extending browsers to add support for new data formats without the need to modify the browser's own code," Raggett wrote. "A common API would be needed for the control path between the browser and the extension. This was later realized by Marc Andreessen when he moved from the NCSA Mosaic project to Netscape, in the form of the Netscape plugin API."
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"If the patent is upheld, it could also affect HTML tags (including APPLET, OBJECT and EMBED) and force developers to modify any web sites that used them."
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Netcraft: Eolas Patent 'A Well Known Idea'.
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