Patent ID: 8095882

Claim:
A method for automatically detecting instances of telephone numbers in a computer document and for providing functionality for any detected instances of telephone numbers in the computer document, comprising the steps of: when opening a computer document in an application such that the computer document will be rendered in a graphical user interface (GUI) window: creating a provisional markup language document for visually rendering the computer document in the GUI window; automatically parsing the computer document and/or the provisional markup language document for any instance of a telephone number; and placing tags around any detected instance of a telephone number in the provisional markup language document; visually rendering the provisional markup language document in the GUI window such that any tagged telephone number provides primary visual indicia that (i) it is a telephone number, and (ii) functionality is available for the telephone number; providing functionality for a user to select any tagged telephone number to perform or initiate one or more desired operations either with or upon the selected tagged telephone number, wherein said functionality is not native to the computer document; and identifying context information surrounding any tagged telephone number and displaying said context information in conjunction with its respective telephone number, the context information including at least an identity associated with the context information and being identified based on one of a proximity of the context information to the respective telephone number in a hierarchical tree and a hierarchical relationship of the context information to the telephone number; wherein the functionality comprise: sending a facsimile transmission to the tagged telephone number; sending a message to the tagged telephone number; and sending the tagged telephone number to a device distinct from the device used by the user to parse the computer document.