The Arbortext implementation of the DOM may be used with SGML documents. Because the DOM portion of the AOM is XML- and HTML-based, features in Arbortext Editor that are available only for SGML, but not for XML, are not supported (such as IGNORE marked sections).

The DOM standard states that management of namespace-qualified elements and attributes will be performed without the insertion or modification of namespace-related XML attributes, at least until a document is actually written to disk. Instead, Arbortext Editor inserts xmlns and xmlns:prefix XML attributes as needed to establish and maintain namespace/prefix bindings.

Arbortext Editor does not return the document type's internal subset, if any. The internalSubset of the DocumentType interface will always return a null string.