Certain example embodiments described herein relate to techniques for processing XML documents of potentially very large sizes. For instance, certain example embodiments parse a potentially large XML document, store the parsed data and some associated metadata in multiple independent blocks or partitions, and instantiate only the particular object model object requested by a program. By including logical references rather than physical memory addresses in such pre-parsed partitions, certain example embodiments make it possible to move the partitions through a caching storage hierarchy without necessarily having to adjust or encode memory references, thereby advantageously enabling dynamic usage of the created partitions and making it possible to cache an arbitrarily large document while consuming a limited amount of program memory. Additionally, certain example embodiments relate to, in addition to delaying the instantiation of nodes, delaying the encoding of respective segments of the XML document until associated nodes are referenced.