There is absolutely nothing to prevent anyone from generating arbirary DOM content from XML using JS; indeed, there's nothing stopping them from creating a complete XSLT implementation. There's just no need to have it in the core of the browser.
You don’t need to generate anything with JavaScript, aside from one call to build an entire DOM object from your XML document. Boom, whole thing’s a DOM.
I guess the fact that it’s obscure knowledge that browsers have great, fast tools for working directly with XML is why we’re losing nice things and will soon be stuck in a nothing-but-JavaScript land of shit.
Lots of protocols are based on XML and browsers are (though, increasingly, “were”) very capable of handling them, with little more than a bridge on the server to overcome their inability to do TCP sockets. Super cool capability, with really good performance because all the important stuff’s in fast and efficient languages rather than JS.
