I’ve been playing around with XML and XSLT and encountered problems when trying to view the XML in IE. This is a problem I’ve noticed before while trying some of the tutorials from W3Schools, and for a long time didn’t even realize it was a problem.

In short, the issue is that you should be able to view XML files in your browser but for some reason every time I tried to view an XML file in IE, the page would appear blank — this shouldn’t happen and wasn’t happening in Firefox, Firefox would display the contents fine. For an example, try viewing this XML from W3Schools. If you are using IE and you can see the contents of the page, you’ll be fine and won’t have any further problems. But if you’re like me and your page was blank, then you wouldn’t be able to view any XML files that are formatted with XSLT. Pretty major problem if you ask me.

After some searching, I found the solution here. The problem as they state is that “…after installing Netscape 8 the XML rendering capabilities of Internet Explorer no longer work…if Netscape 8 remains installed then the registry key is continually rewritten so this is an essential step if you are to be able to view XML content in IE.” Yikes! Sounds like someone goofed up.

Basically you have to uninstall Netscape 8, and then remove a registry key for viewing XML. Yes, certainly not a user-friendly scenario, especially when you consider that the majority of users won’t even realize when they are trying to view an XML file.

Again, if you have this problem go over the steps here for the fix. I’ve tried it out and can now view XML in IE.