Eolas and why software patents are bad.

2006 April 4 at 08:07 » Tagged as :web 0.8, javascript,

Software patents are evil. So there is no surprise that microsoft is at the forefront when it comes to software patent issues.

As open source fans we should be shedding tears of joy when Microsoft loses a patent case and has to write up a check for more than 500 million dollars. We should probably be rejocing cause the patent case has resulted in IE being less user friendly when viewing dynamic content.

In reality many of us will be tearing our hair. Too many IE users are simply too ignorant about the millions of security and other issues that plague IE. They have never heard of mozilla and think firefox is a movie. Most of them would think the reason that they cannot interact with an applet or a flash with out clicking on it is because the web developer did something stupid.

So across the world several hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent by thousands of software companies and web developers changing the way the applets are embedded into web pages.

The extremely stupid microsoft patch allows an applet or flash to be automatically activated if it's loaded by an external javascript instead of being directly embedded with the applet or object tag. So all you need to do is to move your applet tag to a separate file, and use document.writeln to echo out the HTML. Then you can include that code using the script tag and hey presto the applet is activated on start up.