XSLT IE6 default processor

Question

What is the default XSLT processor for IE6. Does it support EXSLT? Is there anyway to make it support it?

Answer 1

You have awakened a tormentor from my past.

MSXML, it was installed as a service update, and the XSLT processor originally included in MSIE6 did not support much of anything other than a very general level of draft functionality. The service update improved on it greatly.

Because of requiring the presence of a service update we never considered performing any client-side XSLT with MSIE6 and instead performed transformations server-side when the client browser was MSIE6 and relayed the transformed content.

Answer 2

The default XSLT processor for IE6 is MSXML 3.0. You can forget about doing XSLT in MSXML 3. What it supports is not even a subset of XSLT, but an older draft. However, most people will have MSXML 4 or higher installed, either through a software update, ms office or some other way. XSLT in MSXML 4 and up is really fast, much faster than XSLT in Firefox.

So, don't test for the IE version, but for the MSXML version. Try MSXML 6 first, and if it doesn't exist fallback to MSXML 4. Don't try MSXML 5, it was an intermediate version used by Office, but is no longer supported by Microsoft.

MSXML supports extension functions (Firefox doesn't, sadly), so you could add EXSLT support with javascript.