The present invention relates to display of visual content on a client device using server-side rasterization of visual content. Visual content is rendered on a server system, transformed into bitmaps compatible with the display attributes of a client device, and transmitted for display on the client device. The invention allows the server to perform, in effect, as a remote browser for displaying Web pages, e-mail, e-mail attachments, electronic document and forms, database queries and results, drawings, presentations, and images at the client device. The approach is "remote" because the server does the rendering and the client provides the interface; "multi-level" because rendered visual content is represented as a multi-level set of raster representations; and constitutes a "browsing system" because the client and server share data about the source visual content element being browsed, and the client performs a specific browsing function assisted by the server.