XML/XSLT rendering issue?

November 30, 2006 1:09 PM

[XML/XSLTFilter] 10.4.8 and Safari let me search an XML database, but they can't seem to display the results properly (they're just a jumbled mess). IE6 and IE7 on XP Pro have no problems handling the same search and the results are displayed in a nice table. I was able to look at some of the code and it looks like something with XML data islands and XSLT stylesheets may have something to do with OS X's problem rendering the results.

We've also tried multiple browsers in OS X (IE, Firefox, Opera) with similar results.

Does anyone have any more insight as to what might be the issue here? I'm not very familiar with XML and XSLT.

If worse comes to worse, Parallels is always an option but I'd rather not have to buy XP just for one thing.

Thanks.


.//chris

posted by hummercash to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

XSLT support is limited to XSL page processing instructions embedded at the top of an XML page, so that might be your problem in Safari. But Firefox and Opera have different rendering engines that are platform independent. Generally when something only works in IE, it's because it was specifically written for IE rather than according to standards. But it's hard to give specific answers with only a vague description of the data. Is this only somewhere you can point to it?
posted by scottreynen at 3:08 PM on November 30, 2006

>10.4.8 and Safari let me search an XML database

I don't think they do! I don't think IE6 and 7 do either. Also, "XML Database" doesn't make sense either. There's really no such thing. There are XML files, and there are databases which might store or output data in XML, but "XML Database"? Not enough to go on.

Do you mean you're using a website with a search form? What do you mean by "jumbled mess"? Is the source code the same in both browsers, but the display is different?

Please describe in a lot more detail what you do, and what happens when you do it.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 3:29 PM on November 30, 2006

The site is probably trying to do dynamic transformation of XML using XSLT. You can investigate this a couple ways.

1. Does the site work in Firefox on Windows? If not, that's an obvious sign that it's using IE-specific functionality.
2. Look through the javascript being used by the page? Do you see the transformNode method being used? That's the IE-specific way of doing dynamic XSLT transformations.
3. Try disabling ActiveX while viewing the site in IE6 (or IE7). I believe that disables the dynamic XSLT transformation functionality.

If this is the problem, the good news is that the site can relatively easily be made cross-platform using Google's AJAXSLT library (or, alternately, Sarissa, although it doesn't support as many older browsers).
posted by gsteff at 6:41 PM on November 30, 2006

I wasn't totally clear above. The site may be trying to do dynamic transformation of XML using XSLT in an IE-specific way.
posted by gsteff at 6:43 PM on November 30, 2006