took a look at w3cshools example. Implemented exactly the same code on my environment. Firefox was performing the transformation as expected Internet Explorer (IE) all versions were failing and returning error:
Webpage error details User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; eSobiSubscriber 2.0.4.16; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; InfoPath.2; OfficeLiveConnector.1.4; OfficeLivePatch.1.3) Timestamp: Thu, 24 Jun 2010 18:10:03 UTC Message: The stylesheet does not contain a document element. The stylesheet may be empty, or it may not be a well-formed XML document. Line: 26 Char: 3 Code: 0 URI: http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/tryit_view.asp
After struggling for a day I’ve found out that my xslt file had extension “.xslt” not “.xsl”. After fixing the extension everything works smoothly. Did no extra checks but I guess that my jboss server was failing to put correct mime type for the file or something similar.