I'm having rendering glitches in IE7 for Vista. IE7 for XP is fine (on 3 different PCs). Msxsl works fine, so I can generate static html files. I just can't preview XML in IE.

For example, here's an XML file:

http://tripalot.com/ipecac/xml/albums/apostrophe.xml (XML)
http://tripalot.com/ipecac/albums/apostrophe/ (static HTML)

Do you see any difference? For me, the top and left parts are fine but the body is clearly messed up. On other pages I've seen garbage characters. When I click on the "songs" link, I see lots of garbage, including text that should not even appear on that page.

However, the IE7 XSLT engine seems to actually work. At least, when I use the "View XSL Output" tool, I see valid HTML. It's just IE's rendering of the page that seems messed up.

Any idea what could be causing the corrupt rendering?

Thanks!

Travis

I just found something interesting...

In each of the corrupt pages, the corruption happens about 8KB (8192 characters) into the page. At that point, IE seems to be displaying random garbage from its memory. It can be pieces of previous pages, later bits of this page, or random junk.

This seems to be a memory-related error. Something bad is happening at the 8 KB mark.

If you've got an IE7 rendering problem, then why are you asking for help on an XSLT forum? You would (presumably) have exactly the same problem if you had written the HTML by hand.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

Sorry; Michael... (Awesome book by the way!) I wasn't (and am still not) sure where I should post XSLT-and-browser issues. There's billions of IE7 users out there, but an elite few XSLT users, so I opted to post on the XSLT forum. I was hoping that a fellow XSLT user would have stumbled upon the same bug.

You know, if I could get my XSLT working in Firefox, I wouldn't need IE7. The thing is, I'm still using the microsoft node-set() function. I need to spend some time figuring out how to make my xslt more portable.

A quick clarification: When I use xslt to generate static html, the resulting html files work fine in IE7. It's only when I try to get IE7 to apply the xslt itself that it has corruption. This only occurs on Vista, not XP.

When I use IE7 on Vista to view the 2 links I posted, the xml link (which requires IE7 to apply the xslt) is corrupt but the static html link (created via msxsl) is fine.

IE7 seems to apply the xslt correctly, since the resulting html appears fine in the "View XSL Output" window. However, it does not render the resulting [dynamically generated] html correctly. It's almost as if IE7 is trying to store the generated html in an 8KB (8192 byte) buffer before displaying it. Pages which require more than 8KB have memory problems.

Is that making more sense now?

Somebody else has reported a similar bug with IE7's XSLT rendering on Vista: http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/...ecurrsion.aspx -- I emailed the author but never got a response.

The author talks about recursion breaking down after about 8192 iterations, causing a stack overflow. I didn't think of my problem as recursion-related, but the stack overflow after 8192 "somethings" (iterations or characters) is very familiar.

Aside from that one author's post (which appeared on multiple forums), I didn't see anyone else mentioning an XSLT bug w/ IE7 for Vista. Maybe not many people are previewing large XSLT transformations in IE7 on Vista yet? Or maybe my system is somehow broken? I won't know until someone tries to reproduce my bug (see the links in my first post).

This bug is really frustrating me. I've tried enabling and disable IE7's protected most and other advanced options, but nothing gets rid of the corruption.

Is there a way to tell IE7 to use a different version of MSXML? I think Vista comes with MSXML 6 SP1. My other PCs' IE7s might be using a different version of MSXML.

How can I find out:

a) what version each PC's IE7 is using
b) how to tell my Vista IE7 to use a different MSXML

Of course, the best thing would be if someone w/ Vista tries to reproduce the bug, so I can determine if the problem is with my system or Vista in general.

A couple days ago I contacted Microsoft's XML and IE teams about the above bug. Last night I received the following response:
Yay! This means the bug wasn't my imagination (or setup), so I haven't been wasting people's time on here. Even better, it means Microsoft is working on a fix!

Hi tripecac,
I also face the same problem with rendering XML/XSLT in Vista. So your topic was very helpful to me.
Have you got the update from Microsoft?

Marik -

There's good news and bad news.

Bad News:
IE 7 (on Vista) is still displaying garbage after about 4 KB. I've installed all the Windows updates, but have still never found a fix for this bug.

Good News:
I was able to get Firefox to do all my XSLT rendering for me. This meant removing some msxsl:nodeset() calls [which are used by IE and MSXSL only], but other than that it was pretty painless. Firefox is my main browser anyway, so once I got XSLT working in Firefox, I didn't care about IE anymore.

So, my recommendation is that you try getting your XSLT to work in Firefox. You can still use MSXSL to generate the static html, but for previewing we need Firefox. (Opera doesn't have full XSLT support yet.)

If you have customers that require XSLT in IE, though, then I think you're out of luck. I guess the only thing you could do is make your pages less than 4 KB. :(

Please let use know how what you end up trying (and observing)!

tripecac,
I found out that not all xml/xsl-files are corrupted. Some of them, even 14Kb-sized, are rendered normally. I'll continue to research what the problem is and if it is possible to work around it.