You've lost me there dude.. what basics is it that you feel are next to impossible? In the last 5 years I have yet to find any problem which I have not been able to solve, nor have I found any problem to which the solution is not quite straight forward.

Safely returning a "<" from a plugin.

To be safe, a plugin needs to look like

sub plugin_name {
   my $text_to_return = ...;
   $text_to_return =~ s{<}{<post_include>path/to/lt</post_include>}g;
   return $text_to_return;
}
[download]

Even then, that's not enough to make a reusable plugin because it hardcodes the path to a template.

By the way, since every plugin (except <post_include>) returns template code, this design is slow because there are soooo many templates to process, and none of them can be precompiled.

To be honest I think your attempting to constrict the dynamism of aXML because your not yet fully comfortable with it. The ability for tags to output tags or fragments of tags is something which I use frequently and is imho one of the coolest properties of aXML.

On the subject of compiling templates, Corion mentioned that a while ago, and I did have a go at writing a compiler but it didn't work out well. Basically I know very little, well nothing really, about compilers so if anyone out there is into compilers and feels like having a bash at it be my guest.

In the meantime it really isn't as slow as you probably think it is, especially on modern hardware.