This is an oldie but a goodie, and one of the most generally useful things I built with MEL (Maya Embedded Language). I was frustrated that there was no straightforward way to import XML data into a MEL script, so I wrote a library to make such data available within Maya. It’s a bit of a workaround, as it creates empty transform nodes to hold each XML element, but doing it that way meant that the structure could be queried after the fact.
I’m sure this could be done in a much better way, now that Maya supports Python, but this was written before that was the case. If you’d like to know more about it, head here