MMMeeja

Whilst working on a fancy-pants sitemap (more to come soon), I’ve discovered quite a few anomalies in the way that different browsers handle XSLT - it’s like web design back in the nineties!

It’s a bit unfair to single out Opera for this post all the big four have their own quirks, but as I can’find much on the web about it, I guess I’ll add my findings.

The XSLT in question takes an XML sitemap file and transforms it into XHTML. The XHTML contains <script> tags that load external javascript to perform some post processing, which is where it all gets a bit weird...

Either not all the scripts are loaded, or they are loaded in parallel because I see errors in the Opera error console that read:

JavaScript - http://local-mmmeeja/sitemap.xml Inline script thread Unhandled exception: "dragdrop.js requires including script.aculo.us' effects.js library"

This is very odd because "dragdrop.js" is a part of the Scriptaculous library.

Even stranger is that closing Opera and re-running the tests will result in different errors. It is this that leads me to suspect it might be a concurrency problem.

Checking the server logs shows that requests are received for every javascript file included, but not in the order they appear in the generated XHTML. All 14 javascript files are requested in the same second too, which suggests some parallelism.

I’ll update this page as I find out more, and post more articles as I track down XSLT weirdness in other browsers. If you can add anything that might help me out, please add a comment.