XML::DOM::Lite is designed to be a reasonably fast, highly portable, XML parser kit written in pure perl, implementing the DOM standard quite closely. To keep performance up and footprint down. The standard pattern for using the XML::DOM::Lite parser kit is to use XML::DOM::Lite qw(Parser :constants); Available exports are : Parser, Node, NodeList, NodeIterator, NodeFilter, XPath, Document, XSLT and the constants. This is mostly for convenience, so that you can save your key-strokes for the fun stuff. Alternatively, to avoid polluting your namespace, you can simply : use XML::DOM::Lite::Parser; use XML::DOM::Lite::Constants qw(:all); # ... etc WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/XML-DOM-Lite/