is not a general purpose XML to hash parser, nor is it especially smart about adding new elements not already accounted for in the code. It's not even that much faster than XML::Handler::2Simple. Slower even :
insert benchmarks here
It can, however, de-Clark-ify element names and tries to be smart about using references for elements that occur more than once, <foaf:thingies> for example.
But, someone asked me about parsing RSS with SAX and it's been a good exercise.