TechNote (Archived)

No XML data is displayed when viewing a page with XSLT content in the browser

Issue

If you preview an XML file attached to an XSLT file or if you preview a server-side page with an XSLT transformation, the browser does not display any XML data. There is no error message. The XSLT file does show XML data when you run Preview in Browser and preview it using the temporary HTML file.

Reason

This problem occurs if you are using a non-RSS or non-Atom news feed. By default, Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 supports all versions ofRSS and Atom feeds. Dreamweaver can be configured to support other types of feeds or default namespaces by editing a simple XML file in the Dreamweaver Configuration folder.

Solution

If you want to use a feed that has a default namespace that Dreamweaver is not already configured to recognize, you can manually edit the following XML configuration file:

C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Dreamweaver 8\Configuration\Shared\XMLPrefixes\XMLPrefixesForDefaultNS.xml

The contents of the XML file are shown below:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><namespaces><namespace prefix="rss"  uri="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/"/><namespace prefix="atom" uri="http://purl.org/atom/ns#"/><namespace prefix="rss2" uri="http://backend.userland.com/rss2"/></namespaces>

If you want Dreamweaver to recognize a new default namespace, add a new namespace node after the "rss2" namespace. The resulting code will look like this:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><namespaces><namespace prefix="rss"  uri="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/"/><namespace prefix="atom" uri="http://purl.org/atom/ns#"/><namespace prefix="rss2" uri="http://backend.userland.com/rss2"/><namespace prefix="<custom prefix>" uri="<custom uri>"/></namespaces>

The name of the prefix attribute is arbitrary. (Ref. 193333)