Microsoft gets XML patent

[Billy Pitts <bpitts5@mac.com>]

Thought everyone might be interested in this recent Slashdot posting:

  On Tuesday, Microsoft was granted U.S. Patent No.7,571,169 for its  
'invention' of the Word-processing document stored in a single XML  
file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML.  
Presumably developers are protected by Microsoft's 'covenant not to  
sue', so the biggest question raised by this patent is: How in the  
world was it granted in light of the 40-year history of document  
markup languages? Next thing you know, the USPTO will give Microsoft  
a patent for Providing Emergency Data in XML format. Oops, too late.