Effective XML: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your XML

DOM

DOM Level 3 should finally make it possible to write completely implementation-independent DOM code, at least in Java. However, in DOM Level 2 some crucial parts of DOM require parser-dependent code, and in other languages this is likely to remain true in DOM Level 3. In particular, DOM2 defines no way to:

• Construct an instance of the DOMImplementation interface

• Parse a document from a stream

Everything else can be done with pure DOM, but these two operations require implementation-specific classes. For example, Xerces loads its DOMImplementation using a nonstandard static method in the org.apache.xerces.dom.DOMImplementationImpl class.

DOMImplementation impl
  = DOMImplementationImpl.getDOMImplementation();

Parsing a document into a DOM tree ...