Re: Patent Fight Could Add to Cost of Inter

["Phillip M Hallam-Baker" <hallam@ai.mit.edu>]

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> > ``We believe it's important to draw a line in the sand and make 
> > them prove infringement,'' said CompuServe spokeswoman Gail 
> > Whitcomb. ``We think their claim is way too broad.'' 
> 
> This is quite a statement coming from a company that flexed its muscles
on
> the .GIF file spec. about 3 years ago.
> 
> If I remember right Compuserve caused some some major changes in RIP and
> HTTP developement.  Until that time the only graphic format supported in
> Mosaic was .GIF.  JPEG was promptly added and there was hot debate about
> the issue.

Having been at CERN at the time and having been the first person to 
incorporate JPEG into a browser (Arena) I know this to be incorrect.

We intended to put JPEG into the browsers from before the time that 
Marc introduced the IMG tag. Indeed a principle point of discussion
on the list was how to cope with multiple formats. We knew that
GIF was poor and that 24 bit screens would soon become the standard.
On the other hand GIF was better for icons, line drawings and such
and had better support from tools. The question was how to do content
negotiation well and support the best configuration for the particular 
hardware. Marc did not exactly allow much time for comment on the
list and chose to interpret the constructive criticism of his IMG tag
as opposition to the idea of transcluded images. Actually the question
was whether images should be a special class of transcluded object,
it really should be possible to transclude HTML within HTML, something
that frames attempts to do but not particularly well.

The patent issue was not of CompuServe's making. They were unaware of the
UNISYS patent when they developed the spec and had they known about it
would have developed GIF differently. When UNISYS asserted their patent
rights CompuServe had no choice to pay up, they did however negotiate
a blanket license agreement which has assisted the rest of the industry
in making agreements.

The main effect of the patent issue was to give added impetus to the 
PNG (prn. "Ping!") which is a patent free extension of the GIF idea.
Unlike GIF PNG is designed to work on the 24 bit displays we use
today and provide a good, general purpose standard for interchange of
images in a lossless manner. JPEG is fine for presentation of images
but useless as an editing format since it looses information on each 
cycle. It is also poor at handling line drawings and other non 
photographic sources (the P in JPEG is Photographic).

It would be nice if the industry would support PNG more widely since
its probably the best piece of original work to come out of the
Web consortium. I believe that Microsoft are supporting it in their
next browser release and even if they don't both 4.0 browsers are
much better at supporting plug ins. 


		Phill