I do think your statement is true for
enterprise/mission-critical/large-scale projects.  On
these kinds of projects, individual developers don't
get to choose the technologies.  The choices are made
by software architects (generally not XML specialists)
and project managers.  As such, their decisions are
driven by perceptions of brand quality.

Developers using Java can use anything that comes in
the JDK they are using.  Developers doing .NET or
Windows programming can use anything that Microsoft
provides.  For these tools, the developer can use any
XML API that just happens to be bundled with the
platfrom they are using.

Beyond that, there is only one similarly strong brand,
and that is Apache.  Developers can usually make a
case to use the latest Xerces or Xalan because the
Apache name is so strong.  Xerces supports DOM, not
JDOM nor XDOM, and that is what it comes down to.

An interesting question would be that of what is
happening in small shops where individual developers
may have more choice.  Who knows, it could be that
they may have more important fads to chase (like
dumping Java or .NET for Python or Ruby) than worrying
about whether to use DOM or not.

Cheers, Tony.

--- Michael Champion <michael.champion@h...>
wrote:

> In some internal discussions of the XLinq
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/future/linq/
> project, I got a very interesting bit of devil's
> advocacy that went something like this:  "People
> complain about the DOM, but they don't embrace
> alternatives.  For all the work that people have
> done to provide alternatives such as JDOM, dom4j,
> XOM, etc. in the Java world, the typical users and
> the major Java players still use DOM, warts and
> all."   I'm not at all convinced this is true, but I
> don't have any information at my fingertips to
> dispute it.  Would anyone care to present facts on
> one side or the other?