In a network environment that includes a plurality of nodes and that uses
a markup language to create documents, a method for filtering the
documents is provided. The method includes the step of, upon receiving a
request from a requesting node among the plurality of nodes, constructing
an input Document Object Model (DOM) based on a document corresponding to
the request. The input DOM is stored. Elements of the input DOM that have
previously been stored are identified. The input DOM is filtered to
obtain a filtered DOM, based on at least one pre-specified rule being
applied to the input DOM.