Appeal No. 2001-0051
Application No. 08/414,240
subclassing as taught by Richter -- and “inverse” inheritance relationships -- which the
rejection equates to superclassing as taught by Richter.
However, Richter’s description of superclassing appears to be no different in
substance from the description in the instant specification of “prior art methods”
distinguished by the instant claims. “[A]s illustrated in Figure 5, a developer-written
object or class inherits from a base class of system support functions and services that
provides the developer with access to the various system functions required for
implementation of the servant object.” (Spec. at 10, ll. 15-18.) That is, Richter’s
superclassing may be considered as a form of inheritance. However, the user (or
developer) creates a new window class that is based on an existing, or “base,” class,
making use of existing system resources. We are persuaded by appellants, as argued
on pages 14 and 15 of the Supplemental Reply Brief, that any “inheritance” taught by
Richter is conventional.
Even if we were to postulate agreement with the examiner’s findings regarding
the Richter reference, the rejection does not otherwise appear to set forth a persuasive
case for prima facie obviousness of the claimed subject matter as a whole. The
rejection asserts that Richter teaches “standard” and “inverse” inheritance relationships,
and alleges that these relationships “resemble” a servant class inheriting from a
wrapper class and a wrapper class inheriting from a servant class. However, locating a
“resemblance” in the prior art falls short of setting out the required factual foundation for
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