One of the reasons for the 'hackable xml' idea that eventually

prompted the MicroXML discussions was because of this.  If you
stripped away some of the complications, you could/should have much
more simplfied apis... the MicroXML push got quite far, but so far I
haven't seen any simplified apis.  I must admit I tried and failed to
come up with anything better that what's out there already... perhaps
it's just not possible in Java.