An alternative to generating atree would be to generate a Parse::RecDescent grammar and then I think you can use a feature of Parse::RecDescent that let's you generate a valid instance conformant to the grammar.

Not yet. But you could use my spew program to do that, and it wouldn't be hard to to use XML::Parser's info about the DTD to generate a valid spew grammar. Hmm. Sounds like a column. :)

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker