DATA PROCESSING SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR GENERATING A REPRESENTATION FOR AND RANDOM ACCESS RENDERING OF ELECTRONIC DOCUMENTS

A data processing system and method for generating a representation of an electronic document, for indexing the electronic document, for navigating the electronic document using its representation and for displaying the electronic document on an output device. The system and method are used with electronic documents having descriptive markup which describes the content or meaning of the document rather than its appearance. Such documents may be represented by a tree. Each markup element defines a node or element in a tree. The tree is represented by providing a unique identifier for each element and for accessing a descriptor of the element. An element descriptor preferably includes indications of the parent, first child, last child, left sibling, right sibling, type name and text location for the element. The document representation is used to facilitate navigation of the text for constructing navigational aids such as table of contents and full text indexing. A document is also provided with a style sheet for specifying desired formatting characteristics for each type of element in the document. To display the document, a suitable starting point is found on the basis of a selected starting point. The document is displayed beginning with the suitable starting point and the format characteristics for each element displayed are retrieved from the style sheet and applied to the text of the displayed element.