Appeal No. 1998-3063
Application 08/632,223
reverse the rejection of claims 1, 4 through 6, 12, 15 through 17, 24 and 27 through 29 under
35 U.S.C. § 102 as being anticipated by Meisel. As such, we therefore reverse the rejection of
dependent claims 3, 14 and 26 under 35 U.S.C. § 103.
As our reproduction of claim 1 earlier in this opinion indicates, an object in the
compound graphical object is stated to own display space encompassing a pointer icon hot
spot. Within the step of determining a lowest level object in the compound object, this step
further recites “wherein each object receiving the first command determines whether the object
has a child object owning display space encompassing the hot-spot and if so passes the first
command to the child object, until a lowest level object owning display space encompassing
the hot spot is found.” As generally argued by appellants in the brief, this feature is not taught in
Meisel.
Although Meisel's information screen 21 and navigation panel 22 are taught in Meisel to
be windows, the reference does not appear to teach that they are programming objects. We
do, however, agree with the examiner's view that while the concept of hierarchy of both the
claimed and disclosed invention and the hierarchy of the reference are the same, the interface
to the display of each is not the same. Page 2 of the specification as filed in the background of
the invention portion states between lines 14 through 18 that “[c]urrent techniques for selecting
and cursoring are generally oriented to flat presentations of objects of the same type, such as
icons on a desktop, cells in a spreadsheet, or graphical drawing objects in a graphics
application.” The present disclosed invention is not flat in the sense that one physical display
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