W3DOM3comments

The use of a getNodes or selectNodes property dramatically enhances the power of the DOM, since it effectively provides a bridge between the DOM and XSLT view of the XML structure. It reinforces the use of XPath as a searching mechanism, and has become an integral part of most coding in the Microsoft XML community. It is vastly superior to the use of getElementsFromTagName and getElementFromID, since in the former case tag name is not altogether a criterion that many people use when selecting multiple items,  and in the latter situation since a search by id is still a search by a given attribute (of which selectNodes("*[@id='myId'']") is a solution that doesn't rely on the use of an explicit DTD or schema. 

-- Kurt Cagle
-- XML Author and Developer