Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simplified subset of SGML. It was originally designed for use in large-scale electronic publishing. However, XML is also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web. The XML standard is a publicly available document that can be viewed or downloaded by using a web browser at http://www.w3c.org/XML/.

The XMLTools package is a collection of commands for manipulating Maple internal representation of XML documents as tree data structures. The package provides a (validating) parser, formatter, access to an XSLT engine, and a number of utilities that define an XML document as an abstract data type.

One purpose of this package is to make it unnecessary to know the storage format for XML documents in Maple by providing access to the element structure information set (ESIS) of the document via Maple routines. (The storage format for XML documents used in Maple is not documented, and is subject to change.)

You should never access any part of a Maple representation of an XML document except by using the commands in the XMLTools package.

Each command in the XMLTools package can be accessed by using either the long form or the short form of the command name in the command calling sequence.

As the underlying implementation of the XMLTools package is a module, it is also possible to use the form XMLTools:-command to access a command from the package. For more information,  see Module Members.

The following is a list of available commands.

To display the help page for a particular XMLTools command, see Getting Help with a Command in a Package.

Most routines that operate on an XML tree data structure change the tree structure in some way, returning a copy of the input tree with the modification implied by the routine. The representation used is immutable. (There is no way to modify an XML tree data structure ``in place.'' In contrast to many XML APIs written in object oriented languages such as C++ or Java, which provide direct access to a DOM representation of XML instances, Maple's XML APIs present to the user the Document Value Model of an XML instance.)

For performance reasons, in routines that accept a Maple XML tree data structure as an argument, type checking of this argument is limited to a surface type check. When debugging code, assertions can be used to further validate that the argument is an XML tree.