diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index b08c431e..06c071f6 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -17,6 +17,7 @@ NEWS ( CHANGELOG and HISTORY )                                     HTMLPurifier
 ! Configuration documentation looks nicer
 ! Added %Core.EscapeNonASCIICharacters to workaround loss of Unicode
   characters while %Core.Encoding is set to a non-UTF-8 encoding.
+- Replaced version check with functionality check for DOM
 . Added smoketest 'all.php', which loads all other smoketests via frames
 . Implemented AttrDef_CSSURI for url(http://google.com) style declarations
 . Added convenient single test selector form on test runner
diff --git a/library/HTMLPurifier/Lexer.php b/library/HTMLPurifier/Lexer.php
index 29e92b66..7e028a2f 100644
--- a/library/HTMLPurifier/Lexer.php
+++ b/library/HTMLPurifier/Lexer.php
@@ -151,7 +151,7 @@ class HTMLPurifier_Lexer
             $lexer = $prototype;
         }
         if (empty($lexer)) {
-            if (version_compare(PHP_VERSION, '5', '>=')) {
+            if (class_exists('DOMDocument')) { // check for DOM support
                 require_once 'HTMLPurifier/Lexer/DOMLex.php';
                 $lexer = new HTMLPurifier_Lexer_DOMLex();
             } else {