Different results selecting HTML elements with XPath in Firefox and Internet Explorer

Question

I'm trying to select a specific HTML element in a document, for firefox i just use:

xpathobj = document.evaluate(xpath, document, null,
               XPathResult.FIRST_ORDERED_NODE_TYPE, null);

which works fine. However when I try the IE equivilent:

xmlDoc=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
xmlDoc.async=false;
xmlDoc.load(document);
xmlDoc.setProperty("SelectionLanguage", "XPath");
xpathobj = xmlDoc.selectNodes(xpath);

I get no object returned. So my question is there an easy way to use XPath to get to the element I want in IE? The XPath I'm using looks like

/HTML/BODY/DIV[9]/DIV[2]

Answer 1

Take a look at http://dev.abiss.gr/sarissa/ project. They have migrated most of XML-related APIs to IE. Otherwise it is indeed also easy to implement. The problems you would need to solve would be: serialization of HTML into valid XML, syncing result of XMLDOM XPath query with original HTMLDOM. To my knowledge they've done it in their library, however, its performance could have been better.