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December 24, 2004
Patent idiocy
Spend, oh, maybe five minutes browsing Fresh Patents and you will probably also find at least a few that strike you as ideas so absurdly common and general as to make you lost faith in the whole damn thing all over again. Like these:
- Utilizing common layout and functionality of multiple web pages (that, is the idea of templates)
- Single column layout for content pages (this one not only contains a strange technical idea—“A parser converts HTML to CSS as necessary…”—but seems to describe a technique entirely based on CSS, maybe with some simple XSLT thing. How is removing borders and padding, and setting td tags to display:block a patentable idea?)
- Graphical user interface including zoom control box representing image and magnification of displayed image
- Method and system for controlling cascaded windows on a gui desktop on a computer (ok, Photoshop already has “tile” and “cascade”, so what’s the least useful variant left? How ‘bout “stack”? Check.)
- Document search engine including highlighting of confident results (er, like Google does it ?)
Posted by Andrew at December 24, 2004 12:33 PM