Standards Body Requests Clarification of Microsoft Patent Controlling Key Web Standards

The Web Standards Project (WSP), an international coalition of Web developers, today called on Microsoft Corp. and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to clarify whether a recent Microsoft patent gives the company control over two key Web standards developed by W3C.

U.S. Patent No. 5860073 appears to include key concepts used in W3C's Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and eXtensible Style Language (XSL) standards, which could potentially require these currently-open standards to be licensed from Microsoft.

If the CSS and XSL standards are in fact covered by the patent, WSP has asked that Microsoft, which participated in W3C's development of these standards, "should immediately take legal steps to ensure these Web standards remain openly available on a nondiscriminatory basis." WSP said in a release that this could include turning over the patent to W3C or other licensing arrangements that preserve the openness of these fundamental standards.

WSP also called on all companies pursuing patents that affect W3C standards to take similar measures.

Seeking closure

Microsoft's patent application was filed in 1995 as the W3C deliberations on style sheet standards began. While Microsoft representatives to W3C may have been unaware of the patent effort, the application does refer to W3C's efforts. WSP construes this to mean that Microsoft as an applicant was at some level aware of the issue and should have disclosed its patent effort to W3C.

"W3C's standards committees should be able to make an informed decision about whether to include something in a standard that may be covered by a patent -- particularly if the patent is held by one of W3C members helping develop that standard," said WSP Project Leader George Olsen.

By contrast, Intermind Corporation, which also is a W3C member, reportedly kept the W3C informed about its effort to patent a technology it believed affected a Web standard under development. (Intermind claims its U.S. Patent No. 5862325, granted last month, covers W3C's proposed Platform for Privacy Preferences [P3P] standard.)

Microsoft's patent claims its innovation is to apply style sheets to text on-the-fly when the document is displayed on a user's computer. But the WSP, citing examples of "prior art," questions whether the patent should have been granted in the first place. Both the original proposal for CSS and several batch pagination systems dating back to the 1960's incorporate technology similar to that which Microsoft claims to have invented.

Tim Bray, a WSP Steering Committee member and co-creator of XML, said, "Back in 1987-88 I helped build a style sheet-driven browser (the chief author was Darrell Raymond) that became a commercial product of Open Text Corporation in 1989. It did several things that the Microsoft patent seems to cover.

"I'm confident that Microsoft will do the right thing and simply ignore the existence of this patent," Bray added.

U.S. Patent No. 5860073 is available from the U.S. Patent Office or via IBM's Intellectual Property Network at http://www.patents.ibm.com

About the Web Standards Project

An international coalition of Web developers and Web experts, the WSP is urging browser makers to fully support Cascading Style Sheet Level 1 (CSS-1), the Document Object Model (DOM) and XML in their products. For more information contact George Olsen or visit the WSP web site.

SOURCE: Web Standards Project, 04 February 1999