matth,

XML Schema does have advantages over DTDs, but DTD technology is probably more mature and understood at the moment. I think only the latest XML modules therefore understand XML Schema.

There are as you say quite a range of XML modules too use, for a quick comparison I would recomend mirod's Ways to Rome article as a good place to start.

I rather like the GNOME based XML::LibXML module, it's very fast, fairly feature complete, very feature rich, and under active development. Others no doubt will suggest other modules.

I'd suggest the following nodes to read, to see what people have said in the past:

• Why is Perl so bad with XML?
• XML parser
• which XML module?
• perl/XML development
• XML Examples (and a call for participation)
• Perl XML FAQ

To give you an idea of ease and speed, I've written simple code that can take one big XML file and parse it to produce over 2000 XHTML pages, and hundreds of folders, in under 1 minute with LibXML and LibXSLT.

Good luck!

update: For XML Schema support check out XML::Schema from Andy Wardley.