1. A method of representing and managing documents having rich text for use by applications, the method comprising: representing rich text in a memory structure representation; providing one or more classes for use by the applications to create the memory structure representation, the one or more classes including a rich text list class to create a rich text list node and to manage one or more rich text nodes and a rich text class to create the one or more rich text nodes each representing a unit of the rich text, wherein the rich text is edited as plain text using an applet; providing well-formed segments of text to the one or more current rich text nodes from a rich text list node to initialize the current rich text nodes for representing rich text in a document; transforming the text from memory format into string representations, wherein the transforming comprises converting the rich text into extensible markup language (XML) and using a compressed format where various attributes of the rich text nodes are captured along with a text value for each of the rich text nodes; and displaying the transformed text in a document.