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January 30, 2003

Prior to SBC

Dan Gillmor, whose countercultural journalistic cry is "My readers know more than I do," asked his readers to come up with "prior art" to dispute SBC's stupid claim to have invented navigation elements on Web pages. And his readers have responded convincingly.

Hell, a company I worked at invented it also: Interleaf's Worldview electronic publishing product let you design a stable frame with links to within the document itself. Damn, we should have patented it! Oh, and we should also have patented the idea of having a window that can display pages sequentially! And pages! Yeah, we invented that!

Posted by D. Weinberger at January 30, 2003 02:10 PM


Comments

What rates as "navigation elements"? Sometime late '94 or early '95 I e-mailed TimBL, telling him how I had been using Peabody under DOS for R&D tech_docs in the late 80s, and mused about having a browser that would sit still ("like a paste-it note") while its links opened in new windows. Am I in?

Posted by: Ben Tremblay | January 30, 2003 05:08 PM


Man, SBC is going to sue your ass!

:)

Posted by: David Weinberger | January 30, 2003 06:01 PM


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