I have an ASP.NET web service which returns an XMLDocument. The web service is called from a Firefox extension using XMLHttpRequest. var serviceRequest = new XMLHttpRequest(); serviecRequest.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "text/xml; charset=utf-8"); I consume the result using responseXML. So far so good. But when I iterate through the XML I retrieve nodeValue - nodeValue is always null. When I check the nodeType the nodeType is type 1 (Node.ELEMENT_NODE == 1). Node.NodeValue states all nodes of type Element will return null. In my webservice I have created a string with the XML i.e. xml="Hank" I then create the XmlDocument XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument(); doc.LoadXML(string); I know I can specify the nodetype using using CreateNode. But when I am just building the xml by appending string values is there a way to change the nodeType to Text so Node.nodeValue will be "content of the text node".