Can Chrome be made to perform an XSL transform on a local file?

Question

I was looking into xslt and started testing with the examples on w3schools.

However, when I save the xml and xsl in files and try opening them locally, chrome won't perform the xsl transform. It just shows a blank page.

I have added the<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="style.xsl"> tag to the xml document, and firefox renders it as it is supposed to look. Also, if I look at the files through a web server, chrome displays the file as it is supposed to look.

Is it that chrome has a problem finding the stylesheet information when the link is local? Changing the href to file:///C:/xsl/style.xsl didn't make any difference.

Update: This seems to be a side effect of a security-policy to not treat file:///* as same origin. This makes the following error appear in the console:

Unsafe attempt to load URL file:///C:/xsl-rpg/style.xsl from frame with URL file:///C:/xsl-rpg/data.xml. Domains, protocols and ports must match.

Answer 1

The short answer is "No, use one of the diverse set of browsers out there".

The reason this doesn't work is due to a security concern that Chrome has addressed in a controversial way^[1][2][3][4], by blocking XML files from accessing local XSLT files in the same directory, while HTML files can access .CSS files in the same directory just fine.

Across the issues cited above, users have asked for a clearer error message (since the domains, protocols and ports do in fact match), or at least displaying the XML without the styling. Chrome developers have ignored these requests.

Answer 2

You can do this locally using Chrome's command line flags.

The specific flag is --allow-file-access-from-files

On OS X: from Terminal.app run /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --allow-file-access-from-files

On Windows: from the command prompt run %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --allow-file-access-from-files

Note: You will probably have to quit Chrome if it is currently running otherwise Ch