To make a long story short, I'm building a trivial query engine over a dataset using XPath; for expressiveness purposes, I've allowed the users of said engine to query for attributes, and assumed that I can simply go up the hierarchy from there and access the elements directly.

I was somewhat dumbfounded to find that each node in the resulting node set had its parentNode property set to null; at first I was sure this has to do with an implementation detail of MSXML3 (perhaps it returns copies of the attributes for... I have no idea what possible gain could be derived from this.) A little more digging proved that, and I quote from MSDN:

In C/C++, IXMLDOMAttribute inherits IXMLDOMNode but are not actually child nodes of the element and are not considered part of the document tree. Attributes are considered members of their associated elements rather than independent and separate. Thus IXMLDOMAttributeparentNode, previousSibling, and nextSibling members have the value Null.

Working under the assumption that this is an MSXML3-only problem, I digged a bit into the W3C DOM specification only to find that it is, in fact, a specification issue:

Attr objects inherit the Node interface, but since they are not actually child nodes of the element they describe, the DOM does not consider them part of the document tree. Thus, the Node attributes parentNode, previousSibling, and nextSibling have a null value for Attr objects. The DOM takes the view that attributes are properties of elements rather than having a separate identity from the elements they are associated with; this should make it more efficient to implement such features as default attributes associated with all elements of a given type.

This seems to me a completely arbitrary design decision. It makes absolutely no sense to inherit from what at first glance is an interface for first-class citizens in the document (Node) and then castrate the interface with useless implementations. If, contractually speaking, attributes never have siblings or parents, then they shouldn't have those properties at all, otherwise this just frustrates the developers wishing to make use of those properties, and wastes their time by forcing them to dig through documentation to figure out what's wrong.

And on top of it all, the decision doesn't even make sense in light of the "efficiency" claim - how is it more efficient to partially implement an interface, instead of defining a new one that's more contractually sound?