Can I capture and save the current state of a webpage using javascript

I need to get the entire contents of a page with javascript and send it to a server script to save it. I want to do this after the user has made some changes to the page using AJAX and other javascript tools. I don't want the state of certain elements. I'd like to essentially get everything inside the body tag so I can pass it to a server-side script. I have tried getelementbyid etc. but it seems to put the page in a loop and crashes.

Thanks