[xsl] mime types, i.e.5, Mozilla, and MathML

[Greg Martel <gregm@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Long question but I could really need some help trying to view 
MathML. And just to establish the fact, I do have the mathml.xsl 
stylesheet by David Carlisle.  (Incidentally, Mr. Carlisle, if you're 
around, I attended the MathML conference in Lisle this weekend and 
heard your talk on the "pan-galactic stylesheet" at the MathML 
conference. It was very informative; but as someone still rather new 
new to programming, xsl, mathml, and server issues i find that i am 
still in need of more help.)

INTERNET EXPLORER 5.
At  the w3c Math test suite site, or their intro to mathML site, 
there are mathml examples; and when I view them in my browser, the 
MathML that these sites have posted will display properly . When I 
paste the same source html/mathml into a document on my pc, and then 
try to open it in the SAME browser, it will not display. Why? This 
sounds to me like for some reason the browser is not able to locate 
the mathml.xsl stylesheet.

I have tried disabling the IE security setting. I have tried copying 
the stylesheet to my desktop with the companion stylesheets 
(ctop.xsl, pmath.xsl, etc.)  and changing the pathname to 
="mathml.xsl" when it was in the same location as my html, and also 
as an absolute pathname from my hard drive "C:\WINDOWS\ . . . " (i 
tried changing the direction of slashes in the previous absolute 
pathname, too), but nothing works. How can the same code on the same 
browser preview correctly from a remote site and yet completely bomb 
on my personal computer?


MOZILLA (The only browser I have successfully viewed homemade mathMl  in):
If I take an XHTML document with MathML embedded, change the 
extension to .xml and view it in Mozilla , I get  exactly what I 
want--an html document with nicely, well pretty nicely, displayed 
math inside (YEAH!). However, when I take the XML document and the 
xslt stylesheet that CREATED that xhtml document, and put a reference 
in the xml to the stylesheet (which uses xsl:import to include 
"mathml.xsl") the output is distorted, untransformed xml surrounding 
a couple patches of correctly displayed math. The dynamic xsl 
transformation case completely fails.  My understanding is that 
Mozilla can read presentation mathml without the mathml.xsl 
stylesheet so i believe no part of the XSL transform was completed.

I have read a discussion about Mozilla and mime types on the xsl list 
which sounds like it might be very closely related to what's 
happening here; the conclusion of that discussion was that Mozilla 
doesn't look at the file extrension, per se; it only looks at the 
mime type,

In Mozilla's Preferences->navigator-> helper applications you can 
assign mime types to file types. I tried to do this; but

a.) Mozilla will not allow me to assign text/xml to both the ".xsl" 
extension and the ".xml" extension. Don't they both need to be of 
type  text/xml?  If not, what is correct for getting Mozilla to 
transform my xsl? So far I have not performed a successful xsl 
transformation of any kind in Mozilla.
b.) In the xsl list discussion of this issue (see "Re: [xsl] Mozilla 
1.0 rc2 Problems" entries), there is no mention of just getting into 
the preferences and changing mime types because the presupposition 
was that mime types are controlled by the server which posts the xml 
and stylesheets. Since everything in the experiments I have been 
trying has been on my desktop, how can this even be an issue? Is my 
pc it's own server--and even if it is , wouldn't it get it's info for 
Mozilla mime types from ...Mozilla?

Basically, my attempts to view mathML through the most popular 
browsers which can do it has been a failure and I need to know why. 
Any help?
--
Thanks,

gregm

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