[XML-SIG] Does anyone do DOM navigation anymore?

[Derek Fountain]

I've spent the last few days tinkering with DOM trees and the DOM API. A 
couple of years back I wrote a fairly complex application which found the 
data it required using this nextSibling, firstChild, sort of navigation. I 
recall the development experience wasn't a terribly happy one, and I have 
always presumed that XPATH was largely invented to get past all this mucking 
about.

So it occurs to me to ask on the SIG list: do people still use the original 
DOM style navigation? When is it preferable to XPATH? Why, in short, is the 
whole "document hopping" idea not deprecated?!