> If I delete a node in a DOM tree I'm assuming *all* of the children are > effectively deleted as well.
Actually, DOM doesn't provide a way to "delete" a node. You can remove a node from its parent, which effectively removes the node as well as all of its children and attributes. But the node still exists, as do its children and attributes (perhaps to move to another portion of the document, or to import into another document). I believe that any "delete" mechanism is implementation specific.
