Appeal 2007-1440
Application 09/920,481
In our view, using email in lieu of an HTTP request to initiate the
transaction as claimed would have been an obvious variant in light of the
commensurate functionality from the user’s perspective achieved by both
types of messages. Moreover, Appellant has not persuasively rebutted the
Examiner’s reliance on the teachings of Talati for the reasons stated on Page
5 of the Answer – a position that we find reasonable. For at least these
reasons, we will sustain the Examiner’s rejection of representative claim 1.
Additionally, we note that Gifford’s system is based on Hypertext
Markup Language (HTML) (Gifford, col. 4, ll. 61-65). As is well known in
the art, a hyperlink in an HTML document is created by providing the
appropriate tags with respect to certain displayed text along with the
reference to the particular link.5
In addition to this standard hyperlinking capability, HTML also
provides the capability to open new email messages when links are clicked.
To this end, a hyperlink that is created using a special HTML tag (“mailto”)
facilitates sending email messages to a desired destination email address
when the link is clicked.6
5 For example, to hyperlink the phrase “THIS IS TEXT” in an HTML
document to a certain URL (e.g., www.uspto.gov), the following syntax is
used: <A HREF=”http://www.uspto.gov”>THIS IS TEXT</A>. See HTML
Basics, at
http://itsinfo.tamu.edu/workshops/handouts/pdf_handouts/html_basics.pdf,
June 11, 2001, at 1-2 (last visited Jul. 2, 2007).
6 See id. at 3. For example, the following HTML syntax will create a
hyperlink corresponding to a user’s name (“John Doe”) that will open a new
email message addressed to name@host when the hyperlink “John Doe” is
clicked: <A HREF>= “mailto:name@host”>John Doe</A>. See also
Entering Subject Using Mailto, in HTML Tips, at
www.digitalpoint.com/tips/html.html, June 6, 1996 (last visited Jul. 3, 2007)
8
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next
Last modified: September 9, 2013