note liz <I>...and it lacks the wealth of modules that CPAN offers.</I> <P> Please note that [cpan://XML::LibXSLT], the XSLT companion to [cpan://XML::LibXML] offers the "register_function" functionality which allows Perl functions to be called from stylesheets. An example (directly from the XML::LibXSLT documentation): <code> XML::LibXSLT->register_function("urn:foo", "bar", sub { scalar localtime }); </code> and then later in a XSLT stylesheet: <code> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:foo="urn:foo"> <xsl:template match="/"> The time is: <xsl:value-of select="foo:bar()"/> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> </code> <P> This implies that CPAN modules <B>can</B> be made available at least in stylesheets using XML::LibXSLT. <P> I've used this approach for a client, who is now running about 40 syndicated websites out of a single database in production using this approach. Even the associated CMS is using XML::LibXSLT with special custom functions for handling forms and updating the underlying database. <P> Typical modules that I've made available that way (directly or indirectly) are [cpan://DBI], [cpan://LWP::UserAgent], [cpan://POSIX], [cpan://Digest::MD5], [cpan://Email::Valid], [cpan://Time::ParseDate], etc. etc. etc. <P> Liz 344355 344355