DOM vs. Grove
The main difference is that the DOM is not schema-driven. It has a single (implicit and as-yet-undocumented) schema -- a schema for the XML notation.
- The DOM can only be used for documents expressed in XML, whereas any information, in any notation, can be represented as a grove.
- Even in XML-land, the DOM does not provide access to the information sets conveyed by specific XML document types, whereas a grove can be a set of nodes that reflect the information set, and that may bear little resemblance to the interchange form of the same information.