At work I've been digging around the WebCore code base, trying to see how Safari supports (or more correctly, doesn't support) XML-related things. I happened to notice a XMLSerializer class that I hadn't heard of before. A bit more digging turned up that Mozilla implements it and Opera 8 will too, thus it is a de facto standard of sorts.

Safari's implementation seems rather limited, with the only method that it supports being serializeToString. Furthermore, it only accepts complete DOM documents. However, it may still be useful in certain circumstances. For example, click here to view the serialized version of my RSS feed. To code to do this is:

function serializeRSS() {
  var request = new XMLHttpRequest();

  request.open("GET", "/index.xml", false);
  request.send(null);

  var serializer = new XMLSerializer();
  alert(serializer.serializeToString(request.responseXML));
}

The best part about the above code snippet is that it's very straightforward and natural-looking. No IFRAME tricks required. No need for regexp-based parsing. Although browser-based development still has a ways to go, I'm glad it's headed in the right direction.