"Press OK to continue loading the content....."

That patent was nulified although has this month been sent back to trial, see this story on The Register (it also has links to previous items in the story)

Basically Eolas lodged a patent for automatically invoking items in a webpage, and got the patent.

At this point it looked like webmasters had a choice between inserting "Click here to view content" on websites to get round the patent (by avoiding the "automatically" part), or license the technology from Eolas.

At one point Microsoft was instructed to pay Eolas $521m for infringing the patent, appealed that decision and then lost. Microsoft was (and still is) challenging the patent, citing "prior art" (in other words Eolas was trying to patent something that others had done already).

Then last March the orginal patent was nullified (due to the prior art arguement), therfore meaning that Microsoft wouldn't have to pay and that webmasters didn't have to recode everything.

The latest is that the appeals court has reversed part of an earlier ruling in the Eolas Vs Microsoft case, therfore sending the whole thing back to court.

Currently webmasters don't have to put "click here to view" messages, because the whole thing is still up in the air.

Fun fun fun!

Matt Kirby, on Mar 16 2005, 18:44, said:

Currently webmasters don't have to put "click here to view" messages, because the whole thing is still up in the air.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It's not webmasters that put the message, it's Internet Explorer firing the messages if the content is embedded in the html. The webmasters have to use the javascript trick to avoit the message.
Here's an example of how to do it found on this page:

For example, the following tags in a page today:

<object classid="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B"
codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab#version=6,0,2,0";
width="320" height="256" align="middle">
<param name="src" value="sample.mov" >
<param name="autoplay" value="true" >
<param name="bgcolor" value="black">
<embed src="sample.mov" autoplay="true" width="320" height="256"
align="middle" pluginspage="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/"; >
</embed>
</object>

would be replaced with:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
  QT_WriteOBJECT('sample.mov', '320', '256', '',
     'autoplay', 'true',
     'bgcolor', 'black',
     'align', 'middle');
</script>

and would generate the following at runtime:

<object classid="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B"
width="320" height="256"
codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab#version=6,0,2,0";
align="middle" >
<param name="src" value="sample.mov">
<param name="autoplay" value="true" >
<param name="bgcolor" value="black">
<embed src="sample.mov" width="320" height="256"
pluginspage="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/";
align="middle" autoplay="true" bgcolor="black" > </embed>
</object>