Understanding XML/RSS ... why won't a local copy of RSS feed display in browser?

Question

If I visit the feed at

http://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/ws/RSS/topalbums/sf=143444/limit=10/xml

with Firefox, it displays the feed as I would expect. But if I copy the source (view source) of this display and save it into a file like feed.xml on my local machine - it will not render the file but gives error:

XML Parsing Error: not well-formed Location: file:///C:/Program%20Files/xampp/htdocs/feed.xml Line Number 27, Column 48: 7.99

I can't understand why the exact same source will not work locally.

Answer 1

When the feed is request from the web server a MIME type (in this case application/xml) is sent with the file which helps the browser to know how to display it.

When you load the file off disk, that information is not there, hence it will be displayed differently.

This doesn't explain your parsing error, but does explain why the feed is displayed differently.