I have to say that I do not understand what do you mean. Could you give us a few examples? So you want to go and convert all DOM Element objects created from a tag with some name converted to some specific datastructure? What do you do with the children? How do you store the result in the parent DOM Element? Or am I completely off?

If I want to deserialize XML, I use XML::Rules. Most likely starting with the ruleset generated by inferRulesFromExample() or inferRulesFromDTD() and tweaking it as needed to get just the data I need the way I need them. Is something like this (skipping the DOM generation) something kinda like what you needed?