How does IE decide which xml parser to use?

[Joe Kehnast]

I have a couple of xml dll's installed on my machine. I used a Microsoft utility to determine which version is used by Internet Explorer. I would like to know how to configure IE to use a specific version of the XML parser. It currently utilizes version 3 sp3, but like it to use version 4 for a test I'm trying to conduct.

 

[Martin Honnen]

I have a couple of xml dll's installed on my machine. I used a Microsoft utility to determine which version is used by Internet Explorer. I would like to know how to configure IE to use a specific version of the XML parser. It currently utilizes version 3 sp3, but like it to use version 4 for a test I'm trying to conduct.

As far as I know you can't configure IE or MSXML 4 in a way that IE uses MSXML 4 for parsing and rendering XML files loaded into the browser window. If you want to use MSXML 4 in IE then you need to use script in a HTML page and load the XML with script e.g. JScript var xmlDocument = new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.DOMDocument.4.0'); xmlDocument.async = true; xmlDocument.onreadystatechange = function { if (xmlDocument.readyState == 4) { alert(xmlDocument.xml); } } xmlDocument.load('test20040610.xml'); The above doesn't test whether Msxml2.DOMDocument.4.0 is found but of course production code should do as no current IE version comes with MSXML 4. I think the reason (or maybe one of the reasons) that you can't install MSXML 4 in a way that it replaces MSXML 3 as IE6 default parser is that MSXML 4 does no longer support the wd-xsl language that MSXML 2 and 3 support and that IE uses to produce the collapsible outline of an XML document that is not associated with a stylesheet.