TEMPLATE IDENTIFICATION WITH DIFFERENTIAL CACHING

It is desirable to send documents to a user in such a way as to minimize the bandwidth and other computer resources required. To this end, a document may be categorized as (1) delta information (information that changes rapidly), (2) sub-template information (information that changes less frequently) and (3) template information, which changes very seldom. The template information and sub-template information are compressed and cached at a site remote from the requesting party. Compressing and caching both sub-template information and template information results in a significant savings of bandwidth and computing resources, such as would be required if the sub-template information were treated as delta information and were not stored in a cache as is the case in the prior art. This savings is enhanced when the compressed template and sub-template information are sent to a large number of users.