"Are all those new fancy DOM traversal, XPath and XSLT APIs really not faster than parsing and joining of strings?" It cannot be understated how much slower to

"Are all those new fancy DOM traversal, XPath and XSLT APIs really not faster than parsing and joining of strings?" It cannot be understated how much slower touching the DOM is compared to doing string manipulation. Any DOM touching - but generating DOM nodes and traversing them is radically slow. If you want to support Internet Explorer it's not even an option, as far as performance goes.