Patentability of HTML tags.

There has been some discussion in this forum about the patentability and
desirability of patenting inventions based on specific new HTML (or
SGML) tags such as in:
   "http://www.ozemail.com.au/~dudmills/CCGpatent.html"

Inventions based on new tags have already been patented.

Use the following URL:
   "http://www.patents.ibm.com/patquery.html"
to see the patent front page, claims and full specification of the
following patents:

US 5,428,529
   "Structured Document Tags Invoking Specialized Functions"
   Assignee: IBM Corp, Armonk, New York, USA
      Filed: 1990/Jun/29
    Granted: 1995/Jun/27
  Examiners: Gail O. Hayes, A. Bodendorf
 Relates to: New tags [CPR] and [/CPR] in SGML to indicate the start and
             end of copyright information and the uses of those tags.

US 5,659,729
   "Method and System for Implementing Hypertext Scroll Attributes"
   Assignee: Sun Microsystems, Inc., Mountain View, California, USA
      Filed: 1996/Feb/01
    Granted: 1997/Aug/19
  Examiners: Paul V. Kulik, Paul K. Lintz
 Relates to: An extension of the anchor element, eg 'SCROLL' in
             [a href=http://foo.com/bar.html/SCROLL="Some Text"]...
             wherein after loading bar.html the browser searches for
             "Some Text" and if found the browser displays bar.html
             starting at "Some Text".

At the very least the granting of these patents demonstrates that
inventions having a special new HTML or SGML tag or element as an
essential component are considered patentable by their US Patent
Examiners.

Received on Sunday, 22 February 1998 01:58:17 UTC