Patent ID: 7543226

Claim:
One or more computer-readable media, having encoded thereon a persistent state of an object, the object having a member function invocable to load one or more properties of the object from markup language text; wherein the object is an instance of a class exhibiting characteristics of data encapsulation, polymorphism, or inheritance; wherein the object is embeddable with other objects in a displayed document; wherein the object is embeddable with other objects in a document displayed for editing and is configured to be altered when the document is displayed for editing; wherein the persistent state comprises the markup language text; wherein the properties of the object are settable from the markup language text of the persistent state; wherein the object comprises an interface for loading and saving the persistent state, the interface comprising: an executable member function for generating the markup language text of the persistent state; an executable member function for restoring the object from the markup language text of the persistent state; wherein the object is an instance of a class and exposes its functionality to client programs that utilize the object; and wherein the interface for loading and saving the persistent state is a group of semantically related member functions of the object.