For anyone else out there with a similar requirement, I have discovered/developed a simple solution to this which at least works with IE, Firefox and Safari and may work with other browsers that I have not yet tested...
function XmlToString(xData) { if (xData.xml) { return xData.xml; } if (typeof XMLSerializer === 'function') { return (new XMLSerializer()).serializeToString(xData); } throw "Unable to serialize XML data!"; } If theres is a better solution I'd be interested to hear it :-)