1. A computer-implemented method for maintaining extensible markup language (XML) documents comprising: processing a first XML document at a content management server so as to split the first XML document into fragments of content according to rules stored in a configuration file; for each fragment of the first XML document, generating i) an object at the content management server to which the fragment of content is bound, the object including content for the fragment, and ii) a reference to replace the fragment of content in the first XML document, said reference expressed in XML and referring to the object at the content management server to which the fragment of content is bound; processing a second XML document at the content management server so as to split the second XML document into fragments of content according to rules stored in the configuration file; and reusing one of the fragments of the first XML document in the second XML document that includes different content from the first XML document, the reusing including the reference in the second XML document referring to the object at the content management server to which the one of the fragments of the first XML document is bound, wherein the content for the object in the second XML document is identical to content for the object in the first XML document, wherein the object is not stored again at the content management server for the second XML document.