The answer to your question may be more complex than you want, but that's good!
First, FrameMaker binary files are proprietary and fairly well compressed, but precisely for your purposes;-), Frame provides the MIF (Maker Interchange Format) file Save As option. You might say MIF is internally how a document looks to FrameMaker (just tokenized for memory compactness, I would guess). When spun out as a file format, it is a verbose, complex ASCII representation of the document using SGML-like tagging (i.e., start/end delimiters for everything). Nothing can exist in a document that the MIF version does not describe. Note that when a MIF file is saved by FrameMaker itself, however, all paragraph, character, table, page layout, and other formatting values are included in excrutiating detail. The actual content may be created in a plain text editor using anticipated or existing markup without having to have any of the actual formatting definitions included, if you opened a document like that, FrameMaker would just apply default formatting while maintaining the tag labels. Then you could apply (File:Import Formats) the formatting from any other FrameMaker document and everything would instantly take on whatever layout/formatting was defined there.
Back to MIF. The biggest problem for people trying to do what you describe is that while a MIF file is relatively sequential, some kinds of document elements are not. Tables for example, are described in a separate section of a MIF file and linked in to the actual location in the document via unique ID number references.
Depending on the complexity of the decomposition you're contemplating, you might be better off doing a shallower breakdown of the document and just make use of the bookmarking and search capabilities of Acrobat, for example. In FrameMaker, you can predefine all paragraph tags (e.g., heading levels, etc.) you like to become PDF bookmarks automatically, levels of indent included. And the hyperlinks in FrameMaker's generated Tables of Contents and other generated lists can be maintained in the PDF so you can look at the Table of Contents in Acrobat, click on a topic, and instantly jump to the topic.
The other extension to your answer is that FrameMaker+SGML allows the document creator to build SGML documents within Frame's WYSIWYG environment.
So the best route for you depends a lot on your particular situation, but it sounds like you sure have options!!
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The answer to your question may be more complex than you want, but that's good! First, FrameMaker binary files are proprietary and fairly well compressed, but precisely for your purposes ;-), Frame provides the MIF (Maker Interchange Format) file Save As option. You might say MIF is internally how a document looks to FrameMaker (just tokenized for memory compactness, I would guess). When spun out as a file format, it is a verbose, complex ASCII representation of the document using SGML-like tagging (i.e., start/end delimiters for everything). Nothing can exist in a document that the MIF version does not describe. Note that when a MIF file is saved by FrameMaker itself, however, all paragraph, character, table, page layout, and other formatting values are included in excrutiating detail. The actual content may be created in a plain text editor using anticipated or existing markup without having to have any of the actual formatting definitions included, if you opened a document like that, FrameMaker would just apply default formatting while maintaining the tag labels. Then you could apply (File:Import Formats) the formatting from any other FrameMaker document and everything would instantly take on whatever layout/formatting was defined there.
Back to MIF. The biggest problem for people trying to do what you describe is that while a MIF file is relatively sequential, some kinds of document elements are not. Tables for example, are described in a separate section of a MIF file and linked in to the actual location in the document via unique ID number references.
Depending on the complexity of the decomposition you're contemplating, you might be better off doing a shallower breakdown of the document and just make use of the bookmarking and search capabilities of Acrobat, for example. In FrameMaker, you can predefine all paragraph tags (e.g., heading levels, etc.) you like to become PDF bookmarks automatically, levels of indent included. And the hyperlinks in FrameMaker's generated Tables of Contents and other generated lists can be maintained in the PDF so you can look at the Table of Contents in Acrobat, click on a topic, and instantly jump to the topic.
The other extension to your answer is that FrameMaker+SGML allows the document creator to build SGML documents within Frame's WYSIWYG environment.
So the best route for you depends a lot on your particular situation, but it sounds like you sure have options!!