I'm no fan of the DOM, and I'm not alone -- probably anyone else who's used it extensively feels the same way. (If you must know, it's the b0rked namespace support that gets on my nerves the most.) I wasn't on the committee that designed the original DOM and its successors, but I'll throw some stones anyway: the current state of affairs is the result of short-sightedly valuing compatibility over correctness. It is possible to make mistakes, and those mistakes should be acknowledged, corrected, and then avoided.
While I'm DOM-bashing, here's a quote from Elliotte Rusty Harold in an interview with Bill Venners:
There's a phrase, "A camel is a horse designed by committee." That's a slur on a camel. A camel is actually very well adapted to its environment. DOM, on the other hand, is the sort of thing that that phrase was meant to describe.
And some comments from Michel Kay from a discussion of the TrAX interfaces on the xml-dev list:
Sadly Java seems to have got itself into the hole that interfaces cannot evolve - or at least if they do, it causes serious disruption. I've had to do major reengineering of Saxon to keep it working across JDK 1.4/1.5 because of changes to the DOM interfaces. (Though if this hastens the death of the bloated monster called DOM, I won't be sorry.)
Amen.
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