MACHINE-ORIENTED EXTENSIBLE DOCUMENT REPRESENTATION AND INTERCHANGE NOTATION

A machine-oriented notation for representation and interchange of extensible documents: a method, system, and computer program product for operating upon (e.g. parsing, and storing documents in) this notation. The notation, referred to herein as “mXML” for “machine-oriented XML”, is designed to be more compact than the Extensible Markup Language (XML), while still conveying the content and semantics of the data and the structure of the document. Documents may be created directly in mXML. In general case, a document represented using mXML notation can be processed more efficiently than when using the existing human-friendly XML notation, requires less storage space, and has a lower transmission cost for data interchange. XML documents can be converted to mXML using techniques of the present invention, and vice versa. Techniques disclosed herein are also applicable to notations other than XML.