Xerox Corp. on Wednesday released an experimental programming language for transforming documents and data between formats so they can be read no matter the application or device.

The new language, called Circus-DTE, comes out of research at Xerox's European lab in Grenoble, France. It can translate documents so they can be viewed from a PDA, a mobile phone, or a notebook computer using a range of applications. Xerox says the language is best suited for multiple document transformation, such as content processing, Internet publishing, database-to-XML conversions, and publishing to handhelds.

Circus-DTE is available at AlphaAve.com, a Web site that's run jointly by Xerox and the Rochester Institute of Technology.