AJAX and Scripting Web Services with E4X
Never mind the AJAX stuff; see part 1 and part 2 of this introduction to see how easy XML processing can be once you get rid of the (de)serialization idea — provided your language offers appropriate support.
I’m firmly convinced that something more or less equivalent to this will be part of mainstream languages one or two years from now.
[found via Holger Arendt]