Patent ID: 6925631

Claim:
A method performed by a computer system of processing an extensible markup language input stream having a tag structure with start and end tags which may enclose further tags, so that the tag structure may be represented by a tree structure, the method using objects mapped to tags contained in the input stream, said objects defining start and end methods which can be invoked, the method comprising: parsing the input stream, as a tag is found during the parsing process, building a tree representation of the input stream and the objects bound to tags by building the object mapped to the tag found into the tree representation according to the tag structure, invoking, during the parsing process, before the input stream is entirely parsed and the tree representation is entirely built, in response to finding a start tag, the start method defined in the object mapped to the tag found, and invoking, during the parsing process, before the input stream is entirely parsed and the tree representation is entirely built, in response to finding an end tag, the end method defined in the object mapped to the tag found, wherein, due to the fact that the object is built into the tree representation before one of the methods defined by it is invoked, the method invoked during the parsing process, before the input stream is entirely parsed, has awareness of the position of the tag to which it is mapped within the tree structure not yet entirely built.