asked on

XSLT and DOCTYPE not working in IE

I have created a simple XSL->XML solution (see below). The problem is I cannot get IE to see the DOCTYPE setting. I want the HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype to come through or else IE ignores my positioning I have setup in the css file. It works fine in FireFox but not in IE. In IE the page is displayed but the positioning information is ignored. (This is when I access the file http://server/test.xml)

I also wrote an ASP script to return the page as XHTML - this has the same result as above - but I did notice the file has the header shown below when it comes down (this is the file generated by the asp script - see below for code). If I remove the first line of the returned XHTML file (<?xml version ... ?>) save the file to the webserver and load it all is well.

Any ideas - I did spend some time googling this - but did not really find much - any ideas

[Returned header from test.asp]

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?> <-- This appears to be the offending item
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>

[TEST.XML]
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="test.xsl"?>
<stuff>
<config>
...
</config>
[END TEST.XML]
The XSL file

[TEST.XSL]
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl=
"http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml"
doctype-system="http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"
doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" indent="yes" />
<xsl:template match="/">
<html>
<head>
...
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="css/layout.css" />
</head>
<body>
....
</body>
[END TEST.XSL]

[TEST.ASP]
<%
'Load XML
set xml = Server.CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM")
xml.async = false
xml.load(Server.MapPath("test.xml"))

'Load XSL
set xsl = Server.CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM")
xsl.async = false
xsl.load(Server.MapPath("test.xsl"))

'Transform file
Response.Write(xml.transformNode(xsl))
%>
[END TEST.ASP]

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

mshogren

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

Julian Hansen

ASKER

Thanks Michael

I tried that but did not seem to make a difference - only tried once though - will keep trying different options and report back.

Julian Hansen

ASKER

Ok - that did the trick

All I had to do was change

<xsl:output method="xml" ...

To

<xsl:output method="html" ...

And remove the

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

From the top of the XML file and it all works very nicely ... guess next time I should read the technical specs.

Thanks for the response