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

Subject: [xsl] mime types, i.e.5, Mozilla, and MathML
From: Greg Martel <gregm@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2002 16:50:13 -0500
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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