Thanks for your reply, John.

Yes, I thought about implementing my objects as wrappers around XML::LibXML::Element objects. However, the problem is that I need to be able to link my objects into a hierarchical structure, and then export that structure into an XML document that reflects the structure of this hierarchy. And, of course, to re-import the XML document by parsing it with the XML::LibXML::Parser, which would build a DOM tree. I would then bless the DOM objects into my classes, magically re-creating the hierarchy of my application's data... (can you see how beautiful it is?) The simplest way to accomplish this is to have my objects be the DOM objects themselves, and use the DOM tree's structure to represent my application's structure.

To wrap the DOM objects would be to require that I link the wrapper objects together to represent my application's structure, and then to link their underlying DOM objects in parallel. This would be a lot of duplication, as well as complexity in keeping the two sets of links consistent. Unfortunately, I might be stuck using a solution like this. It's either that, or revert to using XML::DOM (for which my subclassing scheme worked, but which is sub-optimal for other reasons).

Thanks again,
-brian