> Conceptually, I want to parse the XML and copy the resulting
> nodes to the result tree. But if the result tree is being serialized to XML,
> I don't mind the processor being clever and bypassing the parse/serialize
> operations by copying the raw XML straight to the serial output file."

would you require the processor cleverness to include getting namespaces
right, if so probably parsing and re-serialising is probably about the
best you can do. In theory this is already available as
document('data:text/xml,<foo/>')

> That doesn't deal with the HTML variant of the problem, though ....

No, but you could do
document('data:text/html,<br>')
so long as you knew the html parser used on your text/html input streams
returned things as an "instance of the data model" to use xpath2
terminoligy:-)

the data:mime-type,string URI scheme is a standard scheme (and supported
by netscape since the beginning of time, I think)

David

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