Appeal No. 1997-1654 Page 9
Application No. 08/431,307
The appellants err in considering Rosenthal in less than
its entirety. A reference must be considered as a whole for
what it reveals “to workers in the art.” Panduit Corp. v.
Dennison Mfg. Co., 810 F.2d 1561, 1566, 1 USPQ2d 1593, 1595
(Fed. Cir. 1987). Such workers, moreover, must be presumed to
know something about the art apart from what the references
teach. Jacoby, 309 F.2d at 516, 135 USPQ at 319.
Here, the appellants admit that Rosenthal “teaches a way
to specify default values.” (Appeal Br. at 7.) This teaching
would have suggested “specifying a set of default attributes
....” They also admit that the reference recognizes “that the
ability to override defaults is a worthy goal.” (Id.)
Rosenthal, however, teaches much more.
Specifically, the reference teaches a “‘Hello, World,’”
string in the text of a computer program. Fig. 7. Rosenthal
also teaches creating “a Label Widget to display the string,
overriding the defaults database to set the Label’s value to
the string to display.” P. 78. Because the string is used to
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