Firefox 3 doesn't apply my xslt stylesheet, but other browsers do

Question

I'm trying to serve dynamically generated xml pages from a web server, and provide a custom, static, xslt from the same web server, that will offload the processing into the client web browser.

Until recently, I had this working fine in Firefox 2, 3, IE5, 6 and Chrome. Recently, though, something has changed, and Firefox 3 now displays just the text elements in the source.

The page source starts like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 use simplistic feed sniffing to override desired presentation behavior for this feed, and thus we are obliged to insert this comment, a bit of a waste of bandwidth, unfortunately. This should ensure that the following stylesheet processing instruction is honored by these new browser versions. For some more background you might want to visit the following bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=338621 -->
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="/WebObjects/SantaPreview.woa/Contents/WebServerResources/Root.xsl"?>
<wrapper xmlns="http://www.bbc.co.uk/ContentInterface/Content" xmlns:cont="http://www.bbc.co.uk/ContentInterface/Content" sceneId="T2a_INDEX" serviceName="DSat_T2">
    ....

Firebug shows that the Root.xsl file is being loaded, and the response headers for it include the line

Content-Type    text/xml

I've also tried it with application/xml as the content type, but it makes no difference :-(

The Web Developer Extension shows the correct generated source too, and if you save this and load the page in Firefox, it displays correctly.

The version of Firefox displaying the problem is 3.0.3

Any ideas what I might be doing wrong?

Answer 1

Displaying just the text elements is the behavior you would get out of an empty XSL stylesheet.

To me, that suggests that something fishy is going on with your xpath expressions, and that the xsl:template/@match attributes do not match the source document.

You do not provide enough information to diagnose further, so this blind guess is all I can offer.

EDIT: It turned out the problem was that IE and Chrome silently accept a nodeset as argument to string-length, while FF3 does not. Note that the specification mandates an optional string argument and does not specify behavior with a nodeset argument.

Answer 2

If you're using NoScript, that also disables XSL stylesheets until you Allow <site>.