Patent 7877400 was granted and assigned to Adobe Inc. on January, 2011 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Methods and apparatus, including computer program products, for searching for one or more logical elements in a hierarchical tree structure of an extended markup language document conforming to a schema used for XML. The method includes the steps of (1) providing a representation of an extended markup language document instance containing two or more logical elements, one being a parent node and one a child node in a hierarchical tree structure describing the representation; (2) receiving a query for logical elements satisfying an XPath expression; and (3) searching in the hierarchical tree structure only nodes that potentially have child nodes satisfying the XPath expression.