Gary Edwards's Library tagged MSWord →  View Popular

Marbux discovered this gem, joining the argument with an insightful but disagreeing post.  I however agreed with the articles author, Jeff Cogswell, that both the judge and jury confused the XML pane feature set with metacode mapping claims in the now infamous i4i 449 patent.  If Marbux is right, then HTML-CSS, ODF, and RDF/XML-RDFa are also infringing on this patent.  Which i4i claims is not the case.

Except: Here's one part of the ruling:  ... 
Microsoft Corporation is hereby permanently enjoined from ... selling, offering to sell ... any Infringing and Future Word Products that have the capability of opening a .XML, .DOCX, or .DOCM file ("an XML file") containing custom XML.

The odd wording here is "custom XML," which appears several times in the ruling. Based on the comments in response to eWEEK's articles on the ruling, as well as comments I've seen elsewhere, a great deal of people think the problem was that Microsoft uses XML as its format. But that isn't the case. The ruling focuses on the use of custom XML. The ruling is not about the fact that Word uses XML. If it did, there would be a worldwide disaster, considering how prevalent XML is.

But what exactly is custom XML? To start with, let's look at the claims of the patent itself and try to make a connection. The patent, which was written back in 1994, covers a new way of providing formatting in a word processing program. To understand the claims of the patent, it's important to note the distinction between what the inventors call content and what are called metacodes (which are ultimately formatting codes).

www.eweek.com/...n-Meaning-of-Custom-XML-594907 - Preview

i4i 449-patent MSWord custom-xml

Overview: Aspose.Word is a powerful .NET component that allows any .NET application to work with Microsoft Word documents without utilizing Microsoft Word and Office Automation. Aspose.Word supports a wide array of features including new document creation, document manipulation, powerful mail merge abilities, exporting to multiple formats (DOC, PDF & HTML) and much, much more. Aspose.Word is truly the most affordable, fastest, feature rich Word component on the market. Aspose.Word application programming interface (API) is powerful and easy to use at the same time. Classes, properties and method names are easy to remember and understand: for example, Document represents a Word document, DocumentBuilder is responsible for building a document dynamically, and so on. Although this guilde provides many code samples, intuitively understandable interface allows you create working document producing applications having minimal knowledge of C# or VB.NET and Microsoft Word features. $899

software.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx - Preview

aspose.net word MSWord ooxml

ptsefton.com/...microsoft-office-word-2007.htm - Preview

html css ice MSWord structure RDF metadata