Parsing XML in Web Workers

Question

I know the Web Worker spec says \"no access to DOM because DOM is not thread safe\". While I can see that\'s logical for web workers and the HTML page DOM, it\'s actually ve

Answer 1

Um - answering myself a few hours later - but this may well be a piece of information that proves very useful to people:

There IS an open-source, full function XML parser written entirely in javascript - and it works very well in Web Workers:

XML-JS

Basically, you just need to include tinyxmlsax.js and tinyxmlw3cdom.js in your worker, then follow the doc for using the W3C DOM.

With very little massaging, I got my code to work with both the normal DOMParser (for when running in the foreground) and the xmljs parser.

Obviously its slower - but that really isn't too much of an issue - after all, you're running it in the background!