21. A data processing system for producing a digital form of a portion of a hierarchical digital document, the digital document having descriptive markup defining a plurality of hierarchical elements, wherein each element has a type name, and has at least one of an ancestor element, a child element, a left sibling element, a right sibling element and unformatted text content, the system using a representation of the digital document, including, for each element, an indication of any ancestor element, child element, and left and right sibling element, the system comprising: means for sending a request for a portion of the digital document using an indication of a starting point with in the digital document; means for receiving only the requested portion of the digital document including selected elements containing the indicated starting point; and means for generating a digital form of the received portion of the digital document by applying properties corresponding to the received selected elements to the text content of said elements.
22. The data processing system of claim 21, wherein the means for receiving only the requested portion includes means for receiving a starting point element, the starting point element having been selected according to the indicated starting point; and wherein the means of generating a digital form includes: means for providing a plurality of property specifications for type names utilized for elements in the digital document; means for receiving an identity of any ancestor elements of the starting point element; and means for applying a property specification corresponding to the type name of ancestor elements identified for each selected element to the text content of each selected element to produce the digital form.