Just deleted my BBC link (didn't see you beat me).<p>Anyway from the BBC article (<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8197990.stm" rel="nofollow">http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8197990.stm</a>)<p>"I4i filed a patent in 1998 that outlined a means for "manipulating the architecture and the content of a document separately from each other" invoking XML as a means allowing users to format text documents."<p>Well one issue I see: XML 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation on February 10, 1998.<p>Patent 5787449 (<a href="http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT5787449" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT5787449</a>) was filed Jun 2, 1994 and issued Jul 28, 1998. Can they change the patent that late to include XML?<p>From what I can read the patent is basically describing a system like LaTeX or HTML/CSS anyway.