Good fences
Drop down menus are gadgets that help people navigate complex web sites. Old-school sites generally offered these menus to MSIE users and pretty much left users of Opera, Mozilla, and the other browsers out in the cold, often adding insult to injury with a snotty message about how you need to “upgrade” your web browser before we can allow you to spend your money at a website as cool as this one.
Recently some of the heavies who are building the standards-based web have been experimenting with CSS based drop down menus. But to get out of the lab and into the field, these menus have to be usable by anyone, in any browser, even with Java and JavaScript turned off, and still be valid XHTML and CSS.
Now comes the Accessible Website Menu: Ultimate Drop Down Menu by Brothercake, which claims to do it all. I’ve been there, and it seems to work as advertised. Netscape 4.7 shows plain text links which are a little less intuitive than the drop down menu, but still very usable; Mozilla, Opera, and MSIE seem to behave themselves, showing pretty much identical drop down menus.
So how do we use this discovery in our own websites? That’s where I have a problem. Commercial sites must pay a licensing fee to use the UDM. Non-commercial sites can use UDM without paying a fee if they supply a linkback to the UDM site.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time anybody’s made an intellectual property claim on a standards-based Web technology. In fact, I’m not even sure whether it is 100% standards-based, since, without entangling myself in their IP claims, I can’t check to see whether UDM includes DHTML that will only work in MSIE, or whether they’re using one of the W3C Document Object Model standards.
This is a breakthrough — a minor breakthrough: many of us have built websites for a long time without using a drop down menu — but by wrapping it in the shroud of intellectual property protection instead of giving it to the community, Brothercake have done just when Richard Stallman said in a remark I quoted yesterday: taken two dollars worth of wealth from all of us to gain one dollar for themselves. They’ve cast a pall over all further work on drop down menus for the time being — do you want to risk a lawsuit if you come up with a new approach to drop down menus? And they’ve taken from the work of the real giants in this field without giving back.
Don’t get me wrong: nothing would put the standards-based web on surer footing than people getting rich from it. Getting rich is good. But when you build a fence around part of the standards-based web in the middle of the night and post a “No Trespassing” sign on it, you’re nothing but a squatter, and you deserve to be treated like one. Brothercake haven’t fenced in this area for themselves as much as they’ve fenced themselves out of the new web community. I think it’s incumbent on all of us to support efforts to show prior art and squash Brothercake’s attempt to grab intellectual property that belongs to all of us.