25. A method for randomly accessing and formatting a portion of an electronically published document having fixed content and fixed structure defined by descriptive markup defining a plurality of hierarchical elements, wherein each element has a type name, wherein each element except a root element has an ancestor element and wherein at least one element has content, the electronically published document having a format specification for each type name utilized for elements in the electronically published document, wherein the format specification for a type name defines appearance of content of the elements in the electronically published document having the type name, the method comprising the steps of: selecting a starting point element within the electronically published document; selecting elements of the document beginning with the starting point element; identifying any ancestor elements of the selected elements; and formatting the content of each selected element according to a combination of format specifications for the type names of ancestor elements identified for the selected element and for the type name of the selected element beginning with the starting point element.
26. A method as set forth in claim 25, wherein the step of formatting comprises the steps of: retrieving the format specifications for the type names of the selected element and each ancestor element of the selected element; combining the format specification for the type names of all ancestor elements with the format specification for the type name of the selected element; and applying the combined format specifications to the content of the selected element.