MS Gives 60-Day Deadline to Web Devs 375
capt turnpike writes "Since losing the patent case filed by Eolas, Microsoft has to change radically the way IE works with a lot of content, especially video and other ActiveX controls. eWEEK is reporting that Microsoft has gotten a one-time, 60-day extension in which developers and companies can try to re-engineer their Web pages and ads to work with the new regime. If devs don't make that deadline, users could face pages asking them to activate much of the content, plus ads."
Not just ActiveX... (Score:5, Informative)
So that means every page with any usage of plugins will be broken.
Eolas and Mozilla: still open, can still close (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia currently is still saying "Other browsers such as Opera, Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari might have to implement a similar change to avoid infringement, or to license Eolas' patent".
How to update your pages (Score:5, Informative)
Apple has a helpful page [apple.com] detailing what to do in order to get your pages to continue working as usual with IE.
The day is April 11th. (Score:4, Informative)
The eWeek article doesn't do a very good job of highlighting that.
Re:Not just ActiveX... (Score:5, Informative)
the patent isn't on the specifics of Active-X, but the absolute general vague as hell concept of the browser plug-in. According to Cringley (years ago), Eolas showed a version in the opensource Mosaic codebase to Sun and Netscape *before* java was included in Netscape 2.0. Java is vulnerable.
Won't disable "non-interactive" ActiveX (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A good reason to dump ActiveX (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well, where's the indemnification? (Score:2, Informative)
indemnify
v. to guarantee against any loss which another might suffer. Example: two parties settle a dispute over a contract, and one of them may agree to pay any claims which may arise from the contract, holding the other harmless.
You see, if you understood the word, you would realize that the end user is not suffering a loss. They are losing some convenience.
Microsoft is just the first case. All other browsers will be required to change their way of business as well. The precedent has been set. There is nothing 'indemnifying" Firefox or Opera.
The one that cracks me up is "its permissions-based scheme which is dramatically more hackable than Java's sandbox-based scheme" - lol - never really read about computers before I take it? The patent does not only affect activeX it also affects Java, since last time I looked, Java was a plug-in. Both are affected by the ruling. That baseless statement of false facts (about hackable) does not even apply.
"Ajax page could provide the same level of interactivity as ActiveX" - please - do you have any idea what you are talking about? I didn't think so. Ajax can help avoid postbacks to the server. ActiveX controls are code that has full access to the Win32 stack. Show me an Ajax control^h^h^h^h^h^h^hscript that does what the ActiveX performance Monitor control does.
Re:More details? (Score:3, Informative)
The basic fix is that you don't use an object directly in the HTML. You either add it through document.write() or through the DOM. In other words, the fix is rather trivial, and in the long run makes the page more maintainable.
You can already test this with Windows Update (Score:5, Informative)
I figure they'll move it from optional to required when the deadline is reached.
I've already installed the update so I can get my sites ready.
ActiveX controls cause a little dialog box to appear that makes you hit either "Ok" or "Yes" in order to use an ActiveX control. Honestly this is fairly rare occurance when browsing most sites.
The big thing that is going to trip people up are flash movies. All flash movies now have a border around them when you mouse over them with a tooltip that says "click to activate and use this control".
The good news is that non-interactive flash movies work regardless of whether or not you activate the controls. Not sure why that is, but that has been my expeience. The bad news is that flash menus (unfortunately some clients want that junk) no longer work until you click on the flash movie to activate the control. This also goes for interactive flash movies that track mouse movement and whatnot.
The workaround is to write the flash movie using javascript.
you can do something simple like document.write() each line of the object tag or use something like UFO (http://osflash.org/ufo [osflash.org]) that is XHTML compliant.
Re:Not just ActiveX... (Score:2, Informative)
This is not about IE bing a POS, this is about changing the way all plugins and non-javascript interactive content and plugins work. It's just that Microsoft is the only one to have been sued so far. You can bet that all other browser manufacturers that support any plugins will also be sued if the verdict is not overturned.
This is a patent that was filed in 1994, and granted in 1998. Since the Netscape browser has only been around since '94 [wikipedia.org] and I'm not sure if plug-ins existed before that, this could get very ugly for all browser creators. Of course, there's no guarantee that the original patent filing contained anything about plug-ins (although I don't see that it's been amended since the original filing).
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Informative)
While I'm link-whoring, here's some more stuff if you want insight on the guy: Doyle's homepage [iomas.com], another eWeek interview "Browser Victory Shouldn't Alter HTML" [eweek.com], and an article from I, Cringely [pbs.org] that was one of the first media pieces on the whole issue. More can be found on Google and Wikipedia, of course.
Regardless of Doyle's intentions, I'm against the whole software and business-method patenting regimes. It's been said many times before, but patenting software or business-methods is as ludicrous as patenting story ideas in literature.
Read the Patent Reexamination (Score:2, Informative)
This seems to be where Microsoft gets around the patent by requiring a click to start interactivity. What kills me is that, had the developers of MediaMosaic made a slightly different design decision to enable Embedded-View Editing by default, we wouldn't have this problem. Clearly, MediaMosaic had the concept of in-place interactivity, but one minute design decision blocks the rest of us from taking that next logical step. Shouldn't patents be novel and non-obvious? Seems glaringly obvious to me. The patent examiner states that all points of the patent must be declared in or suggested by prior art. The prior art references include static items that render automatically (without the user first clicking to initiate rendering) and interactive items that require a click. If a static item can start without a click, so can a dynamic item. I disagree with the examiner that the prior art does not suggest the possibility of an automatically interactive dynamic item. Don't you?
A simple design decision enables this patent. Does that not make the patent itself seem untenable? Here stands one more reason why software patents are bad.
Re:Impact on JavaScript (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A good reason to dump ActiveX (Score:4, Informative)
if my Ajax code is broken, i'm going to be pissed, 'cause I can't just say "use firefox", much as I would love to.
Re:Good Riddance (Score:3, Informative)
Rule #5 on slashdot: .Net or Java developer
Never say you are a
I've seen some ugly fights between developers of different languages about this.
Best to declare you are like Switzerland- neutral, not worth conquering, and having nice places to ski.
Re:Impact on JavaScript (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think we're "Y2K"ing this. This will be a huge headache.
Re:A good reason to dump ActiveX (Score:2, Informative)
For some applications, an Ajax page could provide the same level of interactivity as ActiveX.
...except that Ajax in MSIE 5-6 is implemented as an ActiveX control. Whump.
Re:A good reason to dump ActiveX (Score:5, Informative)
Might be time to test those internal apps with the Firefox ActiveX plugin [www.iol.ie], if that's the only thing holding you back...
Re:Good Riddance (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The fix is really easy, just some Javascript (Score:2, Informative)
It's really easy, and there's a number of solutions for embedding Flash [deconcept.com] and Quicktime [deconcept.com] content. (And these methods make it much easier to embed the content and detect the presence of the plugin anyway. Many people are already using it, like youtube.com [youtube.com] for example.
In light of that, this comment is interesting. (Score:2, Informative)
"We're in discussions with major players in the Linux world and are working on a plan to resolve the '906 patent issue with the entire Linux community," Eolas Founder Michael Doyle told eWEEK.com, referring in short hand to the patent's full number. "The solution will be supportive of the open-source community."
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1437469,00.as p [eweek.com]
I haven't heard anything more on this in the intervening time.
Re:Good Riddance (Score:2, Informative)
It only affects IE as Eolas has only filed their suit against Microsoft. Mozilla, Linux, OS-X, and any other OS or browser capable of rendering pages with this content are also going to be in violation of this patent. If Eolas is successful and defeats Microsoft's appeal against the suit, there will be nothing to stop them going after others in violation of this suit....
No doubt your tune will suddenly turn around then....
This suit is really only going to serve Microsoft's interests as it will further complicate and hamper those who would push a world connected by HTML. Something Microsoft is not really that interested in, with the rise of Google they'd really like to see HTML suffer and die [sourceforge.net] and be replaced by their own XAML [xaml.net] markup language. Google is heading down the same path [sourceforge.net] looking to create their own browser, based on an extended version of HTML.