How do I detect XML parsing errors when using Javascript’s DOMParser in a cross-browser way?

This is the best solution I’ve come up with.

I attempt to parse a string that is intentionally invalid XML and observe the namespace of the resulting <parsererror> element. Then, when parsing actual XML, I can use getElementsByTagNameNS to detect the same kind of <parsererror> element and throw a Javascript Error.

// My function that parses a string into an XML DOM, throwing an Error if XML parsing fails
function parseXml(xmlString) {
    var parser = new DOMParser();
    // attempt to parse the passed-in xml
    var dom = parser.parseFromString(xmlString, 'application/xml');
    if(isParseError(dom)) {
        throw new Error('Error parsing XML');
    }
    return dom;
}

function isParseError(parsedDocument) {
    // parser and parsererrorNS could be cached on startup for efficiency
    var parser = new DOMParser(),
        errorneousParse = parser.parseFromString('<', 'application/xml'),
        parsererrorNS = errorneousParse.getElementsByTagName("parsererror")[0].namespaceURI;

    if (parsererrorNS === 'http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml') {
        // In PhantomJS the parseerror element doesn't seem to have a special namespace, so we are just guessing here :(
        return parsedDocument.getElementsByTagName("parsererror").length > 0;
    }

    return parsedDocument.getElementsByTagNameNS(parsererrorNS, 'parsererror').length > 0;
};

Note that this solution doesn’t include the special-casing needed for Internet Explorer. However, things are much more straightforward in IE. XML is parsed with a loadXML method which returns true or false if parsing succeeded or failed, respectively. See http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_parser.asp for an example.