I am trying to create a cross-browser implementation that will take an
XML file, apply a XSL stylesheet to it and return a DOM stack of the
styled XML.

In non-IE browsers I am using something like the following
successfully:

NOTE: value is a global variable and element & url are passed to the
method. Element is the document element that is to contain the parsed
XML DOM and url points to the XSL stylesheet.

if (typeof XSLTProcessor != 'undefined') {
 var processor = new XSLTProcessor();
 var request = getXMLHttpRequest();
 if (request) {
   request.open("GET", url, false);
   request.send(null);
   var xsl = request.responseXML;
   processor.importStylesheet(xsl);
   var fragment = processor.transformToFragment(value, document);
   if (element)
     element.appendChild(fragment);
   }
   else {
     return;
   }
}

In IE there is no XSLTProcessor, but there is the XMLDOM ActiveX
component. Problem is I don't know how to get it to return me an XML
DOM, just text:

else {
 var processor = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
 if (processor) {
   processor.async = false;
   processor.load(url);
   var xmlString = value.transformNode(processor);
   if (element) {
     element.innerHTML = xmlString;
 }
 else {
   return;
 }
}

I've only found the transformNode method which returns a String, but
nothing that will return actual DOM objects.

Thanks in advance.