Most Efficient Way To Highlight Words In A Sentence

Hi All,





I want to give the users the ability to highlight words in sentences on the page in different colors.





Please see link below for an example(watch out for URL wrapping):





http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:fKHSRIxERbUJ:www.codeguru.com/columns/DotNet/article.php/c6603/+XML+serialization+in+.net&hl=en





My MASTER table that contains text is very simple:


TEXT_ID INT


TEXT varchar





I was thinking of something like creating another table to keep track of selection criteria:


USER_NAME varchar // keeps track of which user made the selection


TEXT_ID INT // points to the text id in the MASTER table


START_POS INT // start position of the selection


END_POS INT // end position of the selection


COLOR INT // color of the selection





The thing I don't like about this method, is if user(s) have many words higlighted in the sentences, this table may get very large.





I also thought of maybe combining START_POS, END_POS & COLOR into comma delimited entries:





EX: 1:5:240, 25:30:125 // START_POS:END_POS:COLOR





The thing I don't like about this method, the parsing calculations may take a while to execute.





My goal is to stream as much text data as possible and make it as fast as possible. How does Google or any one else do it?





P.S. Having a copy of a MASTER table with HTML tags in TEXT field is not an option.





Thanks,


Vlad