Yesterday I searched cpan for xml and noticed XML::Simpler thinking it was real. Today XML::Simpler? comes along. After reading through this thread a thought occurred to me. You've answered the complaints about this joke module with several apologies and seem to agree with most of the criticism. Since entirely deleting modules is impossible (?) why not update the module to a new version that really does what its name suggests?

As an XML newbie two problems that plagued me were 1. killing the parser with bad input, and 2. getting back a different character encoding than was input. Perhaps you could come up with some mechanism for helping newbies solve the common XML problems. Maybe it could be a "tutorial module" with training wheels like helpful die messages and suggestions for correcting the errors, explaining the subtle gotchas of XML parsing. After which they'd be ready to graduate to XML::Simple (which btw I've used in all my XML scripts thus far, listed in my sig).

Thanks for reading this far, and for XML::Simple!

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