The responseXML property is read-only and represents the response entity body as parsed by the MSXML XMLDOM parser. For security reasons, the parser validation features are always turned off to prevent MSXML from attempting to download a DTD or XML-Data definition. If the response entity body is not valid XML, this method returns the Document object that was parsed so that you can access the ParseError object through it. (Note that the ParseError object itself is not returned; it is only accessible through the Document object.)

If the response was generated by an ASP page, and the MIME type was not correctly set to 'text/xml', responseXML will be empty.