Whatever happens, small scale or large, this is going to change a lot of things for web designers and developers.

I wonder how we will be embedding content such as Flash, Quicktime, and Java into web pages in the future.

I will end this commentary with this from C|Net:

Microsoft also is said to have proposed other ways to launch applications in a way that could not be held to infringe on the patent, but would avoid the ungainly dialog box solution.

One such option would move the data to the Web page itself, rather than pulling it from an external source. In Microsoft's view, attendees said, the patent only covers a situation in which the Web page called up data located elsewhere. The company is said to have told attendees that it believes so-called inline data falls outside the Eolas patent claims because it is described in the HTML protocol published in 1991--three years before the initial Eolas patent filing....

"This is not an issue just for IE," said Wallent. "This is a potential issue for Netscape Navigator, for Opera and for other browser vendors. This is an industry issue..."

"The W3C has worked very hard to make the Web remain patent free and this might be the one thing that screws it all up. It's really very frustrating."

Like I said, I hope I do not have to pay for use of the <B> tag.

Originally posted on Breaking Windows.