Abstract: The present invention provides a method, system, and computer program product for efficiently serializing navigational state into URLs or the header of the new portal page by using a complete stream-based serialization. The inventive serialization is divided into two sub-processes which are both stream-based. The first stream-based serialization sub-process which is hierarchy-oriented uses the hierarchical object representation of the navigational state and transforms it into a series of events. The events serve as the input for various strategies for compacting information that is associated with these events. At the end of the sub-process the compacted navigational state information carried by the received events is transformed into a character-based representation and the hierarchical structure of the navigational state is derived from the order of the received events and transformed into an additional character-based representation both being directly streamed to the second sub-process.