two weeks ago i encountered a *terrible* but that marked my entire rendering system void. basically (without going into all the upsetting details), any item delivered from my cache was causing errors in MSIE (Switch from current encoding to specified encoding not supported.") and forced FF/Safari to render the plain XML instead of the resulting web document. *crap!*
i struggled with various work arounds trying to isolate the problem, but could *not* find the answer. i am using a mix of XML from the database, XML from a template document and XSL transforms. add to that a sprinkling of caching the generated document to disk for quick reply and i was having a devil of a time sorting it all out. in fact, after several days of no luck, i just put the thing aside for about a week.
well, i started in again last night and - although i got almost no where last night, the solution finally hit me this afternoon. it *was* an encoding issue, but not where i thought it was. not in the database data, not in the template xml, not in the cache file itself, but in the xsl transform! i noticed that a few of my templates worked just fine. but one set (my blog templates) did not. the answer? my transforms for the blog site was **missing the xml version/encoding declaration at the top of the page**!
yep - bonehead play. i was too quick to build my blog templates (in a single night about three weeks ago) and did not fully test them at the time. they worked while i had caching turned off (i do this while developing). it was only after i tunred cahcing back on that the problem came up. apparently, the encoding declaration in the transform is critical to the way the final document is output and (in my case) stored to disk.
once i sorted this out, things are working quite well (sigh). of course, now i will need to do some serious testing to make sure i reach into all the corners, but it's much better now.
man - what a bonehead!
i struggled with various work arounds trying to isolate the problem, but could *not* find the answer. i am using a mix of XML from the database, XML from a template document and XSL transforms. add to that a sprinkling of caching the generated document to disk for quick reply and i was having a devil of a time sorting it all out. in fact, after several days of no luck, i just put the thing aside for about a week.
well, i started in again last night and - although i got almost no where last night, the solution finally hit me this afternoon. it *was* an encoding issue, but not where i thought it was. not in the database data, not in the template xml, not in the cache file itself, but in the xsl transform! i noticed that a few of my templates worked just fine. but one set (my blog templates) did not. the answer? my transforms for the blog site was **missing the xml version/encoding declaration at the top of the page**!
yep - bonehead play. i was too quick to build my blog templates (in a single night about three weeks ago) and did not fully test them at the time. they worked while i had caching turned off (i do this while developing). it was only after i tunred cahcing back on that the problem came up. apparently, the encoding declaration in the transform is critical to the way the final document is output and (in my case) stored to disk.
once i sorted this out, things are working quite well (sigh). of course, now i will need to do some serious testing to make sure i reach into all the corners, but it's much better now.
man - what a bonehead!
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