Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: IE, Flash, and patents: here comes trouble
Besides paying over half a billion dollars to the patent holder, Microsoft is supposed to cripple its market-leading browser so that IE/Windows will no longer seamlessly play Flash, Quicktime, RealVideo, or Adobe Acrobat files, Java applets, and other rich media formats. Once the company does this, any site that uses these technologies will no longer work in the browser most people use.Zeldman explains why this is a nightmare for usability and interface design -- imagine having to read a web page as though it were a scientific manuscript with related figures labeled and referenced and attached, rather than allowing your browser to present it laid out like a magazine. This patent seems to lay claim to the very concept of multimedia — is this something that can be 0wnd?
