The Resource Shelf Guy shares This News.com Article on Microsoft who has suffered another legal setback in the patent dispute with software developer Eolas and is now advising Web authors on workarounds, as new details emerge of its plans to tweak Internet Explorer.
Tough to tell if this is good news or bad news.
“When you think about this, having to go around the patent highlights the stupidity of the patent system,” he said. “Everyone in the field is very saddened by the whole thing, that we have to go through this exercise. The W3C has worked very hard to make the Web remain patent free and this might be the one thing that screws it all up. It’s really very frustrating.”
Give me a dialog box or give me death
Aside from the merits of the patent infringement claim — which I leave up to the legal beagles — this is a perfect example of why it is a Really Bad Idea to design web sites that do not work without plugins.
And what’s so ungainly about a dialog box, anyway? I prefer to have some control over what loads in my browser.