Microsoft patents tabbing through a web page | The Register

[Bo Ahlberg]

 Its also been a common metaphor in UI systems since the 70's... From Military systems for information display and management to the ill-fated "Metaphor" company's LISP based workstations. Tabbed browsing of information is a "technique" that has a lot of prior art and significant "obviousness" as a metaphor. It should have never qualified as a valid technique for patent protection.
Examples in the real-world that make the UI technique "obvious"
1. Patient Charts - the tabbed technique used to display a sense of weight to an electronic chart. In the real world doctors can tell a lot about a patient by the actual weight of the and thickness of a patient's chart. This was taken to the electronic UI asa direct way to communicate that sense of weight that a real physical Chart has. First UI use I know of was 1997.

2. Tactical Information Display - Given the number and types of displays used in tactical weapons applications the use of a "paged" display system having on screen indicators of number, relevance, and order have been used since the early 70's. To be specific I worked on a Tactical system for ASW that used on screen cues similar to tabs that the Tactical and Weapons operators used to call up active data displays. Specific use 1986.

3. Facility Control Systems - explicit use of the tabbed metaphor for security and status displays of Facilities control system for Nuclear Power Plant - 1981

I'm sure there are others of us out there that have experience using this type of display metaphor for information... There is no way Microsoft can claim patent rights to this technique as the company did not exist at the time of certain of these applications, further it has many factors that make it an entirely obvious technique. Somebody needs to toast the foot of these folks and their legal department!

Bo...

On Tuesday, September 07, 2004, at 10:47AM, Tom Ritch <tritch at adelphia.net> wrote:

>I suspect this patent will be of significance mainly for enhancing  
>patent lawyers' incomes.  Was not tabbing between links a common  
>practice already by 1997, or at least obvious based on existing use of  
>hypertext, and thus not patentable?  Paying the lawyers to defend  
>against MS predatory practices could be a problem for Omni.
>
>Tom
>
>On Sep 7, 2004, at 10:23 AM, Jonathan Tyzack wrote:
>
>> Does this mean problems for OmniGroup (and other browser developers)?:
>>