I find it odd that we can have "standard APIs" for the full complexity of
relational data, and probably eventually for object database data, but it
is perceived to be impossible to do the same for the parse tree of XML
data. I mean it is just annotated tree structures: it shouldn't be rocket
science (but neither is it trivial).
No, we don't have such a thing yet, because it is not easy to develop and
nobody is willing to stop and think things through. Over time,
organizations like TechnoTeacher and ISOGEN *are* thinking it through. I
don't claim we've got the problem solved, but our direction is already
much more scalable, generalized and rigorous than what we are seeing in
the DOM realm.
Our approach is, we