Client side XSLT transformation of someone else's XML.

Question

A third-party supplier is providing me with some XML, that one of my applications is happily processing. For debugging reasons, I want to look at it, but it doesn't display anything in the browser, and I (and other members of my team) have to viewsource to look at the (ugly) XML.

This sounds like a classic use-case for XSLT, I thought. I will write a few simple transforms in XSLT to convert this XML into clean HTML. Pop those rules, maybe some Javascript, and a pointer to the XML's URL into a local HTML file, and every time I open the file, voila - freshly fetched and formatted HTML.

However, I am being bitten by the "Common Origin Policy" XMLHttpRequest. It declines to fetch the XML because it comes from a different server - apparently for security reasons to avoid sending inappropriate cookies. That concern is inapplicable in this situation.

I could use the fake the document.domain trick to circumvent this, but I don't think that is applicable when the file was opened in the browser from a local machine, not from a server.

I could redirect everything through a proxy-like web-site to make it look like it came from the same source, but that seems like an bad hack to me, and adds unnecessary network hops.

I could write an whole application for this task, but that seems over-the-top.

I thought I would check if I am missing something obvious. I just want to say "Show me THAT XML document over there, with THIS XSLT file I have with me here." without needing to involve an unnecessary web-server. I'm not sure why it is turning out to be difficult.

Answer 1

How about writing it as a browser addon? There are also some available for firefox.

Answer 2

Sometimes "low-tech" is the way to go. Can't you have your source viewer of you browser linked to something like PSPad. Then it's just a single click to tidy the HTML/XML and you have a nicely formatted xml doc to "enjoy". I know, I know, this means install and download things etc, but still...

I just replied to another post regarding using yahoo's YQL to query any page and return it as JSON, which can then be embedded directly into your html page as a <script> tag. You may have to do something like that to get this all to play nice. Not sure how helpful my answer was as I've never had to do this myself, but if you're curious:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3206753/cross-domain-requests-with-jquery-using-yql/

Incidentally, why is it that nothing displays in the browser?