Dear Godfried,
Instead of teaching Perl from scratch I would give them working little programs which they can then modify to suit their needs (a recipe book approach).
although this seems to be perfectly reasonable,
I think that a procedural language like Perl is easier to grasp than XSLT and to learn.
I wonder how to prove this? Learning a (another) procedural language might be easier for someone who already learned a procedural language, but I find the way XSLT work so quite straight forward that once you understood how XML works it might be easy to understand XSLT too?! If you learned object oriented programming like Java, XML-processing with XSLT, XPath etc seems to be very similar?
But I admit it might be only me estimating this?
Best, Torsten