This one actually comes from Firefox ... for once, IE was ahead of the pack and allowed the removal of an element directly.

This is just my assumption, but I believe the reason that you must remove a child through the parent is due to an issue with the way Firefox handled the reference.

If you call an object to commit hari-kari directly, then immediately after it dies, you are still holding that reference to it. This has the potential to create several nasty bugs... such as failing to remove it, removing it but keeping references to it that appear valid, or simply a memory leak.

I believe that when they realized the issue, the workaround was to remove an element through its parent because when the element is gone, you are now simply holding a reference to the parent. This would stop all that unpleasantness, and (if closing down a tree node by node, for example) would 'zip-up' rather nicely.

It should be an easily fixable bug, but as with many other things in web programming, the release was probably rushed, leading to this... and by the time the next version came around, enough people were using it that changing this would lead to breaking a bunch of code.

Again, all of this is simply my guesswork.

I do, however, look forward to the day when web programming finally gets a full spring cleaning, all these strange little idiosyncracies get cleaned up, and everyone starts playing by the same rules.

Probably the day after my robot servant sues me for back wages.