Re: Microsoft patents emoticons!

From: Måns Rullgård (mru_at_inprovide.com)
Date: 08/03/05 

Date: Wed, 03 Aug 2005 18:50:35 +0100

"David Schwartz" <davids@webmaster.com> writes:

> "Måns Rullgård" <mru@inprovide.com> wrote in message
> news:yw1xzms0b3qa.fsf@inprovide.com...
>
>> Image tags are somewhat different. Something that gets rather close,
>> however, is defining and using XML entities. I'm not sure which
>> document specifies the details, but I know for certain that an SVG
>> document can define something like "&smile;" to be replaced with an
>> SVG fragment, which could be just about anything, including a link to
>> another SVG document or image, inline vector graphics, or an inline
>> bitmap. The SVG specification has several examples of this, one even
>> using a smiley image. An XML entity has a specific form ('&',
>> alphanumeric, ';', or something), so it can't be used to assign
>> graphics to the usual style of smiley character sequences. Maybe this
>> is enough of a difference that it is patentable.
>
> If anyone used this technique for emoticons, that would probably
> be prior art against the Microsoft patent. If the specification
> actually allows you to defined character sequences and then have
> them be replaced by a graphic in the rendered output, and someone
> used that for an emoticon prior to Microsoft filing, that sounds
> like it's spot on.

That's exactly what it does. The possibly significant difference from
the Microsoft thing would be that an XML entity can't be just any
character sequence, so replacing the usual ascii smileys with graphics
can't be done in that way. 

-- 
Måns Rullgård
mru@inprovide.com

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