Method for extracting digests, reformatting and automatic monitoring of structured online documents based on visual programming of document tree navigation and transformation

摘要

A method for extracting digests, reformatting, and automatic monitoring of structured online documents based on visual programming of document tree navigation and transformation is provided for structured online documents such as HTML, XML, SGML document or any document that has internal structure that can be represented by a tree. A digest of an online document is a collection of fragments (30) of this document which are of interest to a user. The system is based on a technique whereby a user selects a fragment of an online document shown in a source window (10) and copies this fragment to a target window (70) that contains the formatting digest. The system generates a sequence of web site navigation commands, online navigation tree commands and fragments commands that cause the assemble of the reformatted digest in the target window (20). The user can later ask the system to replay the generated commands, thus causing the automatic creation of the reformatted digest of the changed version of the online document. The digest documents can be displayed by user agents running on wireless and portable computer devices that have bandwidth and computational power limitations.