The present invention provides a method and system for efficiently handling navigational state by separating the latest navigational state into a base navigational state part and a delta navigational state part. The base navigational state which describes that part of the latest navigational state that is identical across all URLs is encoded in the header of the page markup to be submitted to the client's browser. The delta navigational part that describes the semantics of that specific URL is encoded in its associated URL. Each user interaction using such URL causes the browser to submit the base part as well as the delta part. On the server side the base and delta part are being merged resulting in new navigation state serving as a base for the rendering of the new page. The navigational state is represented as a hierarchical tree-like structure that can be serialized efficiently and compressed by prior art compression techniques. The hierarchical tree-like structure is based on a well-defined state model that is optimized in terms of state serialization. The state model arranges the contained navigational state information in character based information. That saves processing time as it avoids type conversion of navigational information. In addition the present invention includes further strategies to reduce the amount of information that must be serialized.