we tried to hit a webservice deployed in a sOA appliance. this is a http get call. the result is an xml. when we hit the webservice we get the text alone and not in the xml format. where as if we hit this serive in firefox i am able to see the result in xml format. in the xsl we have set the output content type is xml. but still we are not able to see the xml in IE browser? is that the capability of browser that decides this factor?

Just click on the VIEW menu and then on the SOURCE menu item and you'll see the original XML in Notepad.