Appeal No. 1998-3134 Page 3
Application No. 08/437,225
for each graphical element. As more themes are made available
to the user, the amount of memory required to store the
software for the various themes swells.
In contrast, the appellants' program code for control
objects in a GUI is organized as a multi-level hierarchy. At
one level of the hierarchy, each different type of control
defines a class of objects. The definition of a class
includes most, if not all, of the functionality associated
with the objects of that class. In addition, the class
definition includes the overall structure of the object, such
as the relative positions of elements that constitute the
object. The actual appearance of the elements is defined by
user selectable software that resides at a lower level of the
hierarchy. Using this approach, only one instance of the
program code which defines the functionality and overall
structure of each object is required, which reduces the
memory requirements of the program code.
Claim 1, which is representative for our purposes,
follows:
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