FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Contact: Chris Carrico                                       
George Olsen Urge Public Relations                               
2-Lane Media chris@urgepr.com                                    
golsen@2lm.com 213-848-8743                                      
  310-473-3706 x2225

WEB STANDARDS PROJECT CALLS FOR CLARIFICATION OF WHETHER PATENT
GIVES MICROSOFT CONTROL OVER TWO KEY WEB STANDARDS

February 4, 1999 -- The Web Standards Project, an international
coalition of Web developers, today called on Microsoft Corp. and
the World Wide Web Consortium to clarify whether a recent
Microsoft patent gives the company control over two key Web
standards developed by W3C.

U.S. Patent No. 5860073 appears to include key concepts used in
W3C's Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and eXtensible Style Language
(XSL) standards, which could potentially require these
currently-open standards to be licensed from Microsoft.

If the CSS and XSL standards are in fact covered by the patent,
WaSP believes Microsoft, which participated in W3C's development
of these standards, should immediately take legal steps to ensure
these Web standards remain openly available on a
nondiscriminatory basis, assuming that it has not already done
so.

This could include turning over the patent to W3C, or other legal
licensing agreements that irrevocably protect these open
standards, WaSP also called on any other companies that may be
pursuing other patents that affect W3C standards to take similar
measures.

The patent application was filed in 1995 as the W3C deliberations
on the CSS standards began. While Microsoft representatives to
W3C may have been unaware of the patent effort, the patent
application itself refers to W3C's efforts, which WaSP believes
means that Microsoft as an applicant was aware of the issue and
should have disclosed its patent effort to W3C.

"W3C's standards committees should be able to make an informed
decision about whether to include something in a standard that
may be covered by a patent - particularly if the patent is held
by one of W3C members helping develop that standard," said WSP
Project Leader George Olsen said.

By contrast, Intermind Corp, which also is a W3C member,
reportedly kept W3C informed about its effort to patent a
technology it believed affected a Web standard under development.
(Intermind claims its U.S. Patent No. 5862325, granted last
month, covers W3C's proposed Platform for Privacy Preferences
(P3P) standard.)

WaSP also questioned whether Microsoft's patent on "style sheets"
should have been granted because are a number of prior examples
of similar technology, including the original proposal for CSS.

Microsoft's patent claims its innovation is to apply style sheets
to text on-the-fly when the document is displayed on a user's
computer. However, that same technology has been used on several
different batch pagination systems, dating back to the 1960s,
which have been used for book, directory and database publishing.

WaSP Steering Committee member Tim Bray himself helped build an
application that used technology that is similar to what
Microsoft's patent describes.

"Back in 1987-88 I helped build a style sheet-driven browser (the
chief author was Darrell Raymond) that became a commercial
product of Open Text Corporation in 1989," Bray said.  "It did
several things that the Microsoft patent seems to cover.  I'm
confident that Microsoft will do the right thing and simply
ignore the existence of this patent."


About U.S. Patent No. 5860073: U.S. Patent No. 5860073 is
available from the U.S. Patent Office at

http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='5,860,073'.WKU.&OS=PN/5,860,073&RS=PN/5,860,073

Or via IBM's Intellectual Property Network at

http://www.patents.ibm.com/patlist?icnt=US&patent_number=5860073


About The Web Standards Project: WaSP is an international
coalition of Web developers and Web experts who are urging
browser makers to fully support Cascading Style Sheet Level 1
(CSS-1), the Document Object Model (DOM) and XML in their
browsers. Its effort to bring attention to the existing and
potential problems involved with browser incompatibility does not
mean that WaSP is opposed to innovations  by browser
manufacturers. The coalition merely urges browser manufacturers
to use open standards for enhancements and support existing ones
before adding new features.


George Olsen                                    
mailto:golsen@2lm.com Design Director                            
        http://www.2lm.com 2-Lane Media                          
        tel: 310/473-3706 x2225