Method of producing a document based on a scheme that generically describes the format of a bit stream

The invention proposes a method of issuing a bit stream organized in fields according to a certain bit stream format. Each field of the bit stream has a value and semantics. According to the invention the field semantics is issued with the value of the field when the bit stream is displayed so as to provide a version of the bit stream that is human-readable. According to the invention, a schema is proposed that, in addition to generically describing the bit stream format, also comprises components containing said field semantics. This schema is used by a parser for syntactically analyzing an input bit stream to be displayed, thereby generating a structured description of said bit stream. A transformation is then applied to the structured description to generate a document formatted for display.