Patent ID: 7281205

Claim:
A method of generating an encoded representation of a markup language document comprising syntactic elements, said method comprising the steps of: parsing the markup language document to identify at least one syntactic element of that document; identifying a type of the element; processing the element by applying a hash function thereto, the hash function generating a numeric code from the element; and generating the encoded representation including the numeric code; wherein first and second syntactic elements respectively comprise a start tag and an end tag, being a first pair of tags, and said processing of said start tag and of said end tag generates corresponding hashed start and end tags; wherein corresponding hashed start and end tags for the first pair of tags are incorporated into the encoded representation of the document; wherein the document further includes a second pair of tags comprising respective start and end tags, the second pair of tags being nested within the first pair of tags in the document, and said method comprising further steps of: processing the second pair of tags to form corresponding second hashed start and end tags; and augmenting the encoded representation of the document using the corresponding second hashed start and end tags so that the second hashed start and end tags indicate a nesting in relation to the hashed start and end tags for the first pair of tags which is equivalent to the nesting of the second pair of tags within the first pair of tags.