xml-dev - Generic Notions behind Transformations?

[David Wang <dwang@mitre.org>]

Hi all,

I'm trying to find an established/upcoming XML specification/working-draft
that describes/formalizes the generic notions behind transformations and have
not been successful.  i.e. some generic way to describe in XML some ideas such
as:

1) concatentation/substring for strings (including reordering of strings)
2) "simple" mathematical abstractions for numbers (literals) and variables


On the surface, I thought that XSLT and MathML would deal with these two
issues, but I'm not very certain.

XSLT does XML-to-XML transformations (viewing HTML as described by XML) and
can arbitrarily prune/graft/add/remove nodes from a parsed tree as desired (so
one can definitely write a style sheet to swap/concatenate/substring nodes),
but the "notion" of swaping/concatenating/etc is locked into the XSLT "code"
and not freely expressed.

MathML describes mathematical concepts for description/presentation purposes,
but does not appear to say much in the way of allowing "substitution" of
actual values in the formulas (i.e. how to apply the formulas that MathML
describes to obtain real output values from input variables?).  It may be the
case that this is under consideration; if so, any pointer would be
appreciated.

As always, any help/enlightenment is well appreciated. :-)

/David


***************************************************************************
This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers.
To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@xml.org&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev
List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/
***************************************************************************