I've been writing XML and related code for a number of years, and unfortunately, its still not convenient. What I mean by that is that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done before XML can get used.
There are some important resources that can help make it more convenient though. I was working on a PHP / Ming SWF animation yesterday when I needed to parse an XML file into an array. SimpleXML to the rescue! That helpful library made it super easy to access the data, and its awesome that something is available in Perl as well.
"Simple XML" is nice because while we all want our data to be nice and organized, its great when it can be quickly and efficiently accessed in a script.