First of all ++ to you for taking the time to raise such devious porpoises.
If you are going to build an module to turn XML elements and attributes into perl objects, you might as well base it on a wildely used DTD. It might be hard to generalize without using a solid reference point.

I've just started using DocBook as our DTD and I was surpirsed that there was only one module on the CPAN that specifically addressed DocBook. It is a big DTD with over 300 elements but, it could take you down some interesting roads. It is well documented and there is an active mailing list for you to talk with.

As XML becomes more widely used it seems there will be a need to write interfaces for specific DTDs. Personally I would love to see a module that would let me get/set Sect1 titles or get/set all the document authors and editors. People customize DocBook, and it would be cool if your module could read a DTD and provide an interface to all the elements and attributes that are being used.

I don't know how devious your porpoises are, but, it would be interesting to see if you could 'feed' your module a DTD and have it create an interface to the document.

my $parser = DeviousPorpoises->new(generic.dtd);
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