Saturday, November 3, 2007

Why does Firefox not show namespace declarations when rendering raw XML?

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As long as I have been using Mozilla/Firefox I've been surprised that it didn't present raw XML correct. Firefox to me is the compliant, do-it-right browser and then somehow a core functionality as rendering XML isn't show correct (that's to me). Not that it really makes a difference IE does show it to my likening. I've searched for an answer a couple of times but newer really found an answer, making me just even more estranged. In prior searches I've found a default XSLT stylesheet mentioned and that sounded a least to me as a possible hack, that I could modify that and have it my way (since I guessed it was by some principle that it wasn't implemented already. I've never found any examples of such a hack, so I guess it can't be done. Today i did the search again, this time because I had missed and important difference between two XML documents, one being from UDDI version 2 and the other from version 3 - a difference that's hard to find without the namespace declaration. The example is:

This image shows how Firefox doesn't show the namespace declarion, with a screenshot combined with a view source

This time I had the luck to find the real reason, which can be read in two bug reports:

My own conclusion is that it looks like I'll have to give up hope for it. The bugs are old, I'm not even sure I understand them correctly and for certain - I can't and wouldn't dare trying to do something about it. I guess this is one of those situations where Open Source is even more frustrating than closed source, since in principle I could just do it myself (and make world a little better place to live) but I simply can't - I can just watch my unskilled hands and weep.

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