A while ago I did some experiments on creating an XML document by constructing a string versus creating it by using the DOM methods, and I found that the latter was faster than the former. QuirksMode by Peter Paul Koch has a Javascript benchmark for creating HTML however, which claims that using innerHTML is 35 times as fast compared to using the DOM (although I can’t reproduce that number in Internet Explorer 8 (IE 7 mode), it is ‘only’ 22 times faster here).