On Aug 17, 5:31=A0pm, Piet van Oostrum <p...@cs.uu.nl> wrote:
> >>>>> Pete Becker <p...@versatilecoding.com> (PB) wrote:
> >PB> The cited news article is rather superficial. Be careful about drawi=
ng
> >PB> conclusions about how the legal system works from reading such sourc=
es.
> >PB> They're often wrong.
> >PB> The patent itself was filed in 1994 (not 1998, as the article says) =
and
> >PB> issued in 1998. It mentions SGML (the parent of XML) in several plac=
es, and
> >PB> says that the method at issue is fundamentally different because it =
does
> >PB> not put structural information in the data stream. More particularly=
:
> >PB> =A0 =A0 =A0Thus, in sharp contrast to the prior art the present
> >PB> =A0 =A0 =A0invention is based on the practice of separating encoding
> >PB> =A0 =A0 =A0conventions from the content of a document. The invention
> >PB> =A0 =A0 =A0does not use embedded metacoding to differentiate the con=
tent
> >PB> =A0 =A0 =A0of the document, but rather, the metacodes of the documen=
t are
> >PB> =A0 =A0 =A0separated from the content and held in distinct storage i=
n a
> >PB> =A0 =A0 =A0structure called a metacode map, whereas document content=
 is
> >PB> =A0 =A0 =A0held in a mapped content area. Raw content is an extreme
> >PB> =A0 =A0 =A0example of mapped content wherein the latter is totally
> >PB> =A0 =A0 =A0unstructured and has no embedded metacodes in the data st=
ream.
> >PB> That doesn't sound like a description of XML.
>
> Well, read the whole patent. What they do is process a document with
> embedded markup (like troff, SGML, XML, or maybe even TeX) in such a way
> that inside the program the markup is separated from the plain text. The
> external representation is still the marked up text. So it does apply to
> XML. This is quite a primitive way of parsing the markup. It is just
> scanning the input until you find a tag (called metacode in the patent)
> copying the text before the tag to an output area, and copying the tag
> to a list of tags (called a metacode map in the patent). So compared to
> modern parsing techniques there are two differences: (1) nowaday you
> usually build a parse tree; they have just a degenerate tree (only a
> list). (2) usually the plain text is put in the leaves of the tree; they
> have the text in one contiguous area, and the `parse tree' contains
> pointers or indices to this area.
>
> The advantage of their structure comes when you need more than one tag
> structure on top of the text: for example when you both have the
> hierarchical XML structure and a structure with lines and pages.
>
> SGML has the possibility of having more than one structure in the same
> document and that fact is mentioned in the patent.
>
> The only innovative idea in the patent is this separation because it
> makes it easier to do editing on the document when you have more than
> one structure on top of it. And I don't know how innovative it is
> because once you need to edit a marked up text with more than one (markup=
)
> structure on top of it, this is quite a logical choice. And moreover
> ideas cannot be patented, so the idea doesn't count (but IANAL).
>
> Once you have this idea, implementing it is peanuts. You could give this
> to any student that attends a beginner's programming course when they
> have had strings, arrays and loops, and they should be able to solve it.
>
> So the patent is about the transformation of the marked up text to the
> separated data structure and v.v. and about calculating another
> structure from the first one, plus some minor other things. I find it
> really silly that you can get a patent for this kind of thing.
>
> I am writing a small Python program that illustrates the patented
> algorithms.
> --
> Piet van Oostrum <p...@cs.uu.nl>
> URL:http://pietvanoostrum.com[PGP 8DAE142BE17999C4]
> Private email: p...@vanoostrum.org

Isn't this very very similar to the weave and tangle system used in
LaTeX/TeX?