TECHNIQUE FOR CREATING AND EXPANDING ELEMENT MARKS IN A STRUCTURED DOCUMENT

A method for hierarchically expanding and contracting element marks in a structured document. The structured document is hierarchically organized, such as documents written in Standardized General Markup Language (SGML). An element consists of a begin tag and its associated content, and may optionally include an end tag. The editor can mark an element, to produce an element mark, to indicate its selection for document processing operations such as moving, copying or deleting the content of the element mark. The element mark can be hierarchically expanded to higher-level element marks by invoking the expand code as appropriate. The method also can be used to adjust a stream mark to an element mark.