I should perhaps have told that my XML parsing needs do not have a very high byte count - so I am not very concerned about efficiency at this point.

So the main reason for using the msxml COM engine is the same as for climbing mount Everest: it's there.

I do not need to install anything ,and I get an alternate drop-inimplementation from Xerces COM interface (that I do have to install - check apache.org's site for xerces-c, not the like named java implementation).

I could (but have not done it) get the native perl/xerces interface, whose performance should be comparable to xerces.

As for perl's XML:: hierarchy, I do not know. I was never able to get a clean windoze install, from CPAN or otherwise though things hav eprobably improved since my last attempt. I heard people that went through it and were much less then awed by the performance level. (And truly, a large DOM tree made entirely of perl objects must be an unwieldy beast..)

Cheers,
alf
--<br: You can't have everything: where would you put it?