Rich text handling for a web application

A method of representing and managing documents having rich text for use by applications, the method comprising the steps of:

• representing rich text in a memory structure representation;
• providing one or more classes for use by the applications to create the memory structure representation, the one or more classes including a rich text list class to create a rich text list node and to manage one or more rich text nodes and a rich text class to create the one or more rich text nodes each representing a unit of the rich text;
• providing well-formed segments of text to the one or more current rich text nodes from a rich text list node to initialize the current rich text nodes for representing rich text in a document;
• transforming the text from memory format into string representations, and vice versa, wherein the transforming comprises:
• storing one of the rich text as a string in a relational database, and
• formatting the string by converting the rich text into hyper-text markup language (HTML) for storage;
• converting the rich text into XML and using a compressed format where various attributes of each of the rich text nodes are captured, along with the text value for each of the rich text nodes;
• and
• creating rick text memory structure from the HTML, wherein the creating comprises, as a function in the rich text list, taking the HTML that is not well formed, and preprocessing the HTML to make the HTML recognizable by the rich text nodes, wherein the rich text list creates nodes for table structures within the HTML.