my $type = ref($child);

This is a very brittle way of doing it - it's possible that XML::LibXML::Element could be subclassed, and this check would fail, which is why I would recommend against it. It's possible to do $child->isa('XML::LibXML::Element'), but XML::LibXML provides an API to check the node type: $child->nodeType == XML_ELEMENT_NODE (admittedly not a very Perlish way of doing it, but it's based on the libxml2 API).