Another XSLT-related bug in IE

I’ve created an RSS feed that points to various web pages that use client-side XSLT (read this article if you’re not familiar with the architecture of my web sites). The feed is accessible through FeedBurner which modifies the feed slightly to track clicks:

• All the links in the feed are modified to point to FeedBurner URLs
• The FeedBurner URLs encode the actual click destination (this allows FeedBurner to count the clicks)
• FeedBurner uses “301 Moved Permanently” status code to redirect the user to the target web page.

When the target web page is an XML document with xml-stylesheet directive, Firefox and Chrome display it correctly, but IE 8 crashes, as it interprets the XSLT stylesheet address relative to the “old” location (FeedBurner), not the redirected location.

I could fix this problem by hard-coding absolute XSLT URL in the XML document, but then some browser might consider that a potential CSS attack, causing further problems. For the moment, IE 8 has proven to be closer to Firefox and its XSLT woes that I thought.