One embodiment of the present invention provides a system that facilitates identifying objects rendered on a graphic user interface (GUI) in a non-markup-language-presented software application. During operation, the system receives a non-markup-language-presented application at a computer. The system first selects a set of attributes that uniquely distinguish a target GUI object. The system then identifies a set of target GUI objects in the application, wherein a respective GUI object is not represented in a markup language in the received application. Next, the system represents the target GUI objects in the application with a markup-language-based structure, wherein each target GUI object is associated with a corresponding markup-language node in the structure.