Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 03/31/07 11:07

Scripsit Grant Robertson:

> Well, the reason I ask is that I am writing a standard for marking up
> educational material that I hope to submit to the W3C.

Why didn't you say so in your first message? That would have saved anyone's
time. The odds of having a useful system for marking up educational material
approved as a W3C "standard" (recommendation) are comparable to the
proverbial odds of a snowball in Sahara.

> In keeping with
> their policies I would license the technology for free.

It is questionable whether anyone would need a license to use some tags.

> * A patent would preempt another episode of the browser wars

No, not on this planet.

> * If there is already a patent then no one could try to patent the
> technology and steal it from the world for their own profit.

Welcome to Earth. Patents are generally country-specific, and patent offices
aren't literally filled with Einsteins (and a guess Einstein wasn't such a
great patent officer), so patents are granted that should never by granted,
for one reason or another.

> * If there is a patent then my name will be on it.

Perhaps, but nobody knows that. Either the patent is not of any interest to
anything, or some company buys it from you.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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