Hyfinity's XML Virtual Machine

According to The Register, a small UK company called hyfinity have developed what is essentially an XML-based Virtual machine. Code and data are represented in XML and can make use of inbuilt support for XML standards like XPath and XSLT.

It's nice to see this happening, because our computing systems are really in need of support for structured information that's implemented at a much more fundamental level. But at the same time it's concerning to see they have a patent pending on the VM architecture. The patent details aren't discussed but, for one thing, others have thought of this idea before, and more importantly, it is, I think, a far too fundamental thing to patent, something akin to patenting a branch of mathmatics.