In IE9, Imported nodes do not seem to be recognized as SVG Elements

Question

I am adding couple of elements into the existing SVG document using the importNode() method; everything seems to be fine; could get the newly added elements using getElementsBy

Answer 1

The elements inside an xml file need to define what namespace they're in, otherwise they'll get parsed as unknown xml elements.

This is true even if the root of the xml file was an xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" and possibly xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink (if you use xlink attributes anywhere in the file).

If on the other hand you parsed the elements using an html5 parser, the constraints are similar but slightly different since xmlns attributes aren't recognized in html (only in xhtml). You'd need at least an