The present invention represents header and footer structures in a markup
language (ML) document. The ML document may be parsed by applications
that understand ML other than the application that generated the ML
document. The ML document may be manipulated on a server or anywhere even
when the application creating the ML document is not present. The header
or footer originally used in the ML document may be manipulated when the
ML document is parsed by other applications. Header and footer
information (i.e., properties) are saved in a markup language (ML)
document without data loss, while allowing the header and footer
structures to be parsed by ML-aware applications and to be read by ML
programmers.