Problem
I created an XML stylesheet which I wanted to place on a local Samba share. In the XML file to be transformed, I placed a file:// URI in the xml-stylesheet tag, but it wouldn't work in Firefox. Internet Explorer would happily format the content as expected, but Firefox simply displayed a rather uninformative error:
Error loading stylesheet: (null)
Cause
As it turns out, I was formatting the URI incorrectly.
Solution
Proper URI formatting for the file protocol requires three slashes to establish an empty authority or host segment, followed by the full path, with all backslashes converted to forward slashes. Since it was a path to a file on a local Samba server, which normally begins with two backslashes, this means I needed a total of five forward slashes following file:!
So, given a Windows-style path such as:
\\myserver\mypath\mystylesheet.xslt
The corresponding URI would be:
file://///myserver/mypath/mystylesheet.xslt
Yielding an xml-stylesheet tag like
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl"
href="file://///myserver/mypath/mystylesheet.xslt">
