initially, the intention was to inject the type as a magic attribute.
But this turned out to make the implementation brittle, asymmetric
and either quite demanding, or inefficient.
The only sane approach would be to introduce a third collection,
the metadata attributes. Then it would be possible to handle these
automatically, but expose them through the iterator.
In the end I decided against it, just the type attribute
allone does not justify that effort. So now the type is an
special magic field and kept apart from any object data.