But from the perspective of a component programming
environment, where each application object has a
peer member (or is a member) of the DOM tree,
there seems to be a big advantage:
a standard navigation api.
So having a standard for converting an application-specific
document reference into application-specific elements of
a DOM tree means that we have decoupled the
application code from the tool that builds the DOM tree.
It also then creates a standard new kind of component--
an XObject, which could be a really good thing indeed
if they are easy to write.
Bill