The general limits of DOM include:

  • The entire document must be parsed before the tree is available to the application.
  • You cannot load a subset of the document.
  • Because the whole tree must exist in memory, it may not be suitable for handling very large XML documents.
  • A single error in the XML file may prevent the document from being loaded. This limit makes DOM less attractive for use cases where XML is being retrieved in a stream rather than as a static document.