Here's something from IE9 beta that warms mt heart - and as the blog says "Although these APIs are non-standard, they are supported in the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera."

Today I want to get back to web development by discussing some additions to the platform in IE9 Beta: DOMParser and XMLSerializer. What do they do?

DOMParser enables building a document from an XML string and XMLSerializer allows you to serialize it back again. Together they make XML to DOM conversions as simple as using JSON, making it easier to use XML as a data-transfer format. More importantly, the nodes created by DOMParser are native, meaning they can be inserted and rendered within any web page.

[blogs.msdn.com...]