Oooh, i see i was unclear.

Thou shalt not pollute thy namespace with auto-generated, out-of-control aka user-supplied names

Indeed! i meant to imply the case where the coder has already written the packages; the handler would create a new object of the appropriate type, not a new class.

of course, you have to know what the classes are called for each element; i was thinking along the lines of:

my $handler = new XML::PerlSAX::Handler::Sanctum(
  # assume all packages are named "Publish::$element"
  baseclass => 'Publisher',
  # prefer "Publish::$parent::$element" 
  #   over "Publish::$element", to allow a book title 
  #   to be a different object than a chapter title.
  heirarchic => 'preferred',
  );

my $otherhandler = new XML::PerlSAX::Handler::Sanctum(
  dictionary => { 
    # clear cases...
    BOOK => 'Publish::Book',
    CHAPTER => 'Publish::Chapter',
    PARAGRAPH => 'Publish::Paragraph',
    # <BOOK><TITLE></TITLE></BOOK> gets treated differently
    # than <CHAPTER><TITLE>... or <PARAGRAPH><TITLE>...
    'BOOK TITLE' => 'Publish::Book::Title',
    'CHAPTER TITLE' => 'Publish::Chapter::Title',
    TITLE => 'Publish::SectionHeading',
    }
  );
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honestly, it had occurred to me to create the classes if they couldn't be found, but i decided that i'd only do that if the user told me to do so, and even then only if they didn't already exist. and maybe not even then; let the user auto-create their objects if they want.

thanks for the pointer to mirod's work, as well.

.