Current electronic document retrieval systems, i.e., database systems or information retrieval systems, do not handle enough the richness related to the document structures. Based on a classical model of structured documents, our approach intends to integrate propagation mechanisms related to document structure. These machanisms, called “scopes of attributes”, have two goals: they exhibit information that is usually kept implicit in documents, and they address dependencies between the values of the attributes used for the retrieval of the documents. The model of documents, the propagation and retrieval mechanisms compose a generic framework for the retrieval of structured documents.