>>What versions of netscape contain built in support for XML? Does IE 4.0 contain built in support for XML?
>
>No.
>
>Here is a previous post from Ken Levy.
>
>++++++++
>If they had Netscape browser, you could simply do the .transformNode() on the server (like in an ASP) and return HTML, so that the client wouldn't see the XML. You just need either IE5 or just the new MSXML parser on your server, and you can then execute CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM"), and you're done. If you program in Java on the server, you can download the same parser used by IE5 from http://datachannel.com which DataChannel created with Microsoft, same exact interface.
>+++++++

This post from Ken is partly inaccurate. The Microsoft XML parser is not available independent of IE: the machine using it must have at least IE 4.01 installed to use it. The cause of much pain on my part.

As for IE and XML compatibility, yes, and no. IE 4 shipped with MS' first version of msxml.dll. This got you access to the msxml COM object, which had only basic document navigation functionality. It had all the functions to open, parse and traverse a document by drilling down into nodes, but did not contain advanced features like validation and the TransformNode method, which is needed to apply an XSL stylesheet to a document. Without the latter feature, XML is mostly useless from a browser, because the data is not user friendly, and cannot be converted to HTML without a LOT of script.