Lightweight Tools for Lightweight Markup

The 'Desperate Perl Hacker' lives... in a slightly different arena

Myth XML was designed so that even relative beginners have a chance at processing XML documents easily without the need for XML-specific tools.
Reality The options available to document creators and parser designers make it difficult to process more than a small subset of XML directly using text-manipulation tools.
Promise Scripting languages provide the right balance of ease of use and power to handle a wide variety of XML processing tasks, working with the information fed to them by an XML parser.