creating a DOM subtree ...

Is there a compact way to create a DOM subtree from a string containing 
marked-up text ? I am looking for a call similar to IE's insertAdjacentHTML.
I think it is very useful and practical to have such a call in DOM 2.
I know that we can achieve the same thing with a bunch of createElement,
createAttribute, createTextNode and appendChilds. But it is very practical
to be able to append a string containing markup. User agents can be
easily optimized to create this subtree much faster than by doing individual
calls to create the whole subtree.

What do you think ?

--
ramky